Question Ceiling Speakers for home 7 room distributed audio

baronm

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Hi All,

I am in the process of moving house and plan to install a distributed audio system in the new place.

The system will have 7 zones (lounge, kitchen, dining room, 4 x bedrooms) and will be used almost exclusively for music (Sonos, radio, podcasts, MP3s from server etc).

I have been looking around and something along the lines of the following are what I have come up with:

KEF Ci130CR (~ £240 per pair)
Q Acoustics QI65C (~ £180 per pair)

What are your opinions of these two, or better alternatives within a similar price range?

I've already budgeted for hoody's for all speakers too!

Thanks

Mark
 
Monitor Audio do a good range of ceiling speakers. I have 4 of them in my kitchen and they do a good job.
 
I have installed hundreds of ceiling speakers into private homes, airports and other public buildings, pubs and clubs during my working life and have come to the following conclusions:

1) It's impossible to pick a £200 speaker in the ceiling from a £30 speaker.
2) for long runs (over 20mtrs) use a 100volt line system
3) The final sound is highly dependent on the ceiling material.
4) Rattles are absolutely inevitable.

Hope this helps.
 
I have installed hundreds of ceiling speakers into private homes, airports and other public buildings, pubs and clubs during my working life and have come to the following conclusions:

1) It's impossible to pick a £200 speaker in the ceiling from a £30 speaker.
2) for long runs (over 20mtrs) use a 100volt line system
3) The final sound is highly dependent on the ceiling material.
4) Rattles are absolutely inevitable.

Hope this helps.


Can you recommend a good value ceiling speaker for Atmos height duties?
 
Tarpot-

Atmos configurations although remarkably flexible still require speakers to be positioned in the conventional positions for practical purposes. Once you decide on the number you are going to fit and where, the actual speakers you use don't really matter, as long as they are of reasonable quality and well-constructed. You could even use some of the newer floor-mounted speakers designed to replicate ceiling configurations, they do sound remarkably good (they deflect the sound onto the ceiling to give an impression of sound emanation from above you). Remember when installing that most of the sources to which you will be listening will have been designed for channeled, not Atmos systems.
Tony.
 
Thanks Tony.

I'm refitting a room out from scratch. So I'm going to install 4 speakers in the ceiling, in line with Atmos recommendations around the seating area.

So I'm looking for something decent without breaking the bank.

But I'm not sure what to look for.
 
Any half decent 8" speakers will do the job, just look at the build quality, make sure the ceiling is as rattle-free as you can possibly get, and don't get fooled by the monster cable brigade-if you look at the individual speakers you'll see the actual voice coil wire is marginally thicker than a human hair, so why use massive cables to it? The only reason to use big cables is on the subbie where you can get high currents and only then if the cable run is more than 20 mtrs.
Use a good quality stranded cable such as is used for a ceiling downlight, nothing more is required.
All the smoke and mirrors cannot usurp the laws of physics, remember that in the end you are using a transducer whose object is to move air, nothing more, nothing less. It is important to ensure the same polarity is used on all speakers, get cable which has a trace or better still, different colours. For your subbie, bigger is always better, remember you are moving air so the larger the diameter, the truer will be your low frequencies, a Bose cannon system is what I used in the nightclubs, and they were biiiggg!
 

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