millsryno said:
I see a lot of these "OEM" brand in-wall speakers on eBay. Are these legit speakers? I see so many of them on there....
My couch is backed right up to a wall and because of hallways there are not any walls directly to the right and left to mount speakers. They have to either go on the ceiling or the wall behind the couch which extends one foot longer than the couch on each side.
Also I am a little confused on frequency. There is so much variation on this between manufacturers and models by the same manufacturer. I see some high end stuff with smaller ranges and I see some higher end stuff with larger ranges. Is there a rule of thumb I should be using as a guideline? Being the noob I am, I would think a larger range is better.
Would I be better off with 5.1, 6.1 or 7.1 with the logicstics of where my couch and walls are located?
looks like alot of ground to cover here. easy ones first..
if your sofa is already against the back wall, then you would do well to use just 5.1. you could do 7.1 ok if you didn't have the limit of in-wall speakers. in-wall speakers have a very narrow sound cone, so by the time you got a set of side-surround speakers close enough to your sitting position to hear them, they would be right next to the rear surrounds anyway.
frequency range is only moderately important to your application. in general, the wider the range (especially on the low end), the better the speaker. since you are working with the surround portion only (if I read right), the surrounds really only need to do a good job on producing the mid-range and tweeter frequencies. A speaker that could produce 80 Hz to 18KHz would work very well. You just don't want something that starts much over 80. A speaker that reaches over 20KHz is beyond the range of human hearing (but if your dog watches alot of Animal Planet, you could probably score some points with him on this one). if you are going with mains, you want 60Hz or lower as a starting point, and much lower if you don't plan to use a subwoofer..
since you are so close to the back wall, your best bet is to place the speakers either in the ceiling or behind the sofa at the normal height for the ears of a person who would be sitting. you simply don't have enough spacing for the sound to spread out very quickly.
a rotating tweeter is useful, but good speaker placement is better. as far as OEM speakers, there are too many reputable brand out there at decent prices to risk getting some moon-made import.
if you are planning to use in-walls for the front, you're going to need help from someone alot more used to them than me. it might be tough to get a good spread of sound (although you can get some well-regarded ON-wall speakers- these NHT speakers run $ 399 each at accessoriesforless.com)
