What's better, in-wall or in-ceiling speakers?

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: rivan
I've got the house for this - we just moved into our 'long term house' to raise our daughter and soon-to-be-born son in.

Sadly, now that we're in the big house (the second for each of us) and have the kids, I don't have the time or money to put any of this together anymore.

Good luck with your stuff - I'm envious 🙂

I do have a little input on in-wall/ceiling speakers, however. I've had a pair of in-walls from Infinity, and a pair of in-ceiling from a local company (www.atlassound.com); both performed nicely at normal volumes - background-music sort of volume, where you can have people over and not end up raising your voice. It likely had everything to do with the placement of the speakers, but the in-ceiling speakers filled the room (kitchen in their case) FAR better. The sound spread through the room much more evenly and with pleasing tone everywhere.

In both cases the speakers had solid mounting cases that I backfilled with foam.

In this new house, when I finally get around to getting music into all the rooms, it'll be with in-ceiling speakers, with the exception of the home theater.

Nice, thanks for sharing! A lot of the IBL subwoofer designs I've looked at are meant to go in the ceiling as well, so that would make a nice match. I do want a system that is loud enough to be heard when you have a few friends over, although I'm not such a socialite that I have parties every weekend at my place; I rarely have more than 5 or 6 people over a time max. Do you think I should go with a 2-speaker system or a 4-speaker system (2 rights, 2 lefts)? I'm not really up to speed on square footage and how big rooms are in writing vs. in person, so I'm not sure what the best approach would be at this point. Also I do plan on starting a family (got married in 2005) and since I've moved a lot, I kind of want to build a nice house and be done with it - 3 or 4 bedrooms, settle down, have kids, etc.

The home theater is going to be my real baby 😀 I have big plans for it (another item I'm hoping I can wrap up in the home loan, hehe). I am a huge fan of projectors and YoYo has given me tons of guidance on this subject, so I have a pretty good idea of what I want. The core of the system will an xNAS server (still in the works), with a few terabytes worth of storage. The network will consist of a mix of wired and wireless connections; the house itself will be wired for Gigabit Ethernet. The home theater itself will be in the basement, and then each TV will have a TiVo and a modded Xbox (TiVo for television and Xbox for streaming media). The home theater will have all the goodies - widescreen HD projector, 7.1 surround sound, etc. The home theater is 100% planned out right now, but I'm keeping it under wraps until it actually comes to life :laugh:

Well I can talk big, but it's all a dream right now. At least dreaming is free 😀

 

[Scarpozzi]

In many ways, ceiling is better because you can position them directly over the seating. Some in-wall units are more 'directional' though, so it really depends on if you're setting it up for home theater or music

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
In many ways, ceiling is better because you can position them directly over the seating. Some in-wall units are more 'directional' though, so it really depends on if you're setting it up for home theater or music

It would be for music only, the home theater stuff is a separate system.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: Quasmo
For the Home theater, just make a really nice HTPC, and then buy an XBox 360 per TV. I run 4 TV tuners in my current HTPC + 1 HD Tuner. You'll need probably 2TB of HDD for storage (and if you Vista, you can break the 2TB limit w/ GPT) Just get at least one tuner per XBox, and a crap load of memory and processing power. Unless you want to go CableCard, and thats a whole new box of worms, that I'm not feeling to good about right now, fvcking cable labs.

Yeah, a nice part of having to wait on this is allowing time for CableCard to mature. I'm not sold on HD yet. When I build my house, I will include it in my basement home theater, but that's it. I am also a huge TiVo fan (my wife moreso than me), so being able to network an HD and SD TiVo together (like from our bedroom to the home theater) will be great. I am not a big fan of Microsoft's Windows Media Center; I prefer to keep it all open-source with my own file server system and some modded Xboxes. My requirement's aren't too crazy, mainly just music and movies, so I don't need every feature under the sun.

One of my goals is to keep this simple enough for my wife to use. She likes her Mac and she likes the TiVo, so I'll be golden if I can keep it simple. The TiVo does everything I want right now as far as television goes - pauses live TV, records shows, lets you delete them, plus you can hack the boxes to hold larger and/or dual hard drives. Based on the reviews I've read of the HD TiVo both here and elsewhere, I'm not too excited about it right now 😛 Hopefully that will improve with time, however.

Getting back to the central server, I'm currently planning on building a 5-terabyte server using 750gb Seagate hard drives. I'm hoping the price will drop when the 1-terabyte Hitachi drives come out so that the Seagates will be more affordable. The server will mainly be used for storing movies, music, and computer file backups. I can slap a modded Xbox on each TV and have instant access to all of the server media, no discs required. My plan is to put one in the basement home theater, one in the exercise room on a small TV so you can watch a movie or TV show while working out, one in the guest/napping room, one in the living room, and one in the baby room. Media saturation ftw! 😀 Between the Xbox and the TiVo, I have all the multimedia stuff I can think of. Of course the home theater room will have other goodies like HD (TV/Bluray/HD-DVD) and gaming and whatnot 😀

 

[Kaido]

bump for discussion for the evening crowd 🙂