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The Great Unknown - Ceiling Speakers

mangoes4hands

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First post on here and I'm very grateful to have found this community, as it has been immensely educational (I have a new desktop setup of miniDSP HD and 8030Cs on the way because of it!).

I have a home under construction and have been in the process of outfitting audio in the home, and I'll tell you if finding data on speakers generally has been a challenge, doing so with ceiling speakers is virtually impossible. The fixed installation means it is much more difficult to substitute speakers, yet it is very difficult to compare very many speakers.

I get the sense that there is a ton of snake oil being sold when it comes to ceiling speakers, and I think it would be both fascinating and hugely helpful to see in ceiling speaker reviews here. I'm not sure what the testing setup would even be for that, but hoping that's a possibility some day on here. I think there is certainly an interested segment in the audio community.
 

Sancus

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First of all, I highly recommend the Trinnov Speaker Position Guide, even if you don't have the money for one of those ;) It will go into far more detail than you can imagine about recommended speaker layouts for all types(Atmos/Auro/etc) of immersive speaker layouts.

There are a few basic facts to consider, known from this guide, AVSForum, and other sources:

The best ceiling speaker is actually an angled normal speaker mounted to the ceiling. You see this in some modern super-high-end-studio setups. That's because there aren't really any speaker designs with even and wide enough dispersion that fit in a ceiling to aim down and still sound good at the MLP in many layouts. The closest thing to a good aim-down ceiling speaker is probably one of the high-end Kef designs, since they're coaxial and have the same dispersion in all directions. They also actually publish basic measurements for them in the spec sheets(!).

The directivity issue is probably more important for .4 or .6 Atmos layouts with multiple seating rows, as the .2 layout puts the speaker fairly close to being directly above the listeners.

This leads to the fact that the Revel C763L was actually used to master about ~90% of Bluray soundtracks. Unfortunately, it was discontinued. It's a 3-way design with an angled MTM+woofer setup that aims the sound towards the listening position rather than straight down.

There are measurements available for all the Revel ceiling and wall speakers in the lineup, btw, but most(all?) of the current production versions are down-firing, I think.

I personally use angled bookshelves for my height channels, but there is a long thread about ideal ceiling speakers on AVSForum that you may wish to peruse. There may be other ceiling speakers than Revel and Kef with publisher measurements, I'm not sure.
 
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mangoes4hands

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Holy smoke, 170 page thread! Will definitely take me a bit to get through that, thanks for the heads up!

To clarify, my primary use case will be a 2.0 setup, so not as focused on Atmos function. Not sure whether that is a relevant distinction.
 

Sancus

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Holy smoke, 170 page thread! Will definitely take me a bit to get through that, thanks for the heads up!

To clarify, my primary use case will be a 2.0 setup, so not as focused on Atmos function. Not sure whether that is a relevant distinction.

Ah OK, well no I don't think there is actually any difference in requirements. But for that simple use case, I would say that you should be OK with down-firing ones(that measure well, of course) as long as they are above wherever your listening position will be.

If they would be far from your listening position, then you would really want angled bookshelves or some design similar to the C763L. Actually, I just read that the C763L was not discontinued, it's just been backordered for a really long time. So you may still be able to get your hands on those if you're patient and they're in your budget. There are also some new waveguided JBL designs mentioned in that post, but I didn't see measurements.

I will further add that if you don't actually have a MLP defined, and you just want ambient music for the room, the Kef coaxial in-ceiling designs are probably your best bet for that use case, since they have that 360-degree even dispersion which non-coaxial designs cannot match. And they're one of a very short list of companies that have shown SOTA coaxial designs in their other speakers.
 

EdTice

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This leads to the fact that the Revel C763L was actually used to master about ~90% of Bluray soundtracks. Unfortunately, it was discontinued. It's a 3-way design with an angled MTM+woofer setup that aims the sound towards the listening position rather than straight down.

There are measurements available for all the Revel ceiling and wall speakers in the lineup, btw, but most(all?) of the current production versions are down-firing, I think.
The C763 on offer at Crutchfield appears to be a two way design. Is this a new product with an old number for marketing purposes or maybe I am misreading your post?

 

EdTice

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First post on here and I'm very grateful to have found this community, as it has been immensely educational (I have a new desktop setup of miniDSP HD and 8030Cs on the way because of it!).

I have a home under construction and have been in the process of outfitting audio in the home, and I'll tell you if finding data on speakers generally has been a challenge, doing so with ceiling speakers is virtually impossible. The fixed installation means it is much more difficult to substitute speakers, yet it is very difficult to compare very many speakers.

I get the sense that there is a ton of snake oil being sold when it comes to ceiling speakers, and I think it would be both fascinating and hugely helpful to see in ceiling speaker reviews here. I'm not sure what the testing setup would even be for that, but hoping that's a possibility some day on here. I think there is certainly an interested segment in the audio community.
Since I've already bumped this thread lets do it again. The three contenders for people who have to have jobs seem to be the Airmotiv Vaulta which has a tweeter angle that can be adjusted, the Revel C763 for all of the reasons previously mentioned and, of course the JBL Arena 81C. The Airmotiv is half the price so it seems really attractive.
 

Sancus

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The C763 on offer at Crutchfield appears to be a two way design. Is this a new product with an old number for marketing purposes or maybe I am misreading your post?

C763L
 

EdTice

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C763L
I missed an L. Must be Christmas. That's why they call it No el! Sorry couldn't help myself. Gorgeous speakers. Guess they have to be when each individual speaker costs more than a pair of Genelecs!
 

Sancus

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I missed an L. Must be Christmas. That's why they call it No el! Sorry couldn't help myself. Gorgeous speakers. Guess they have to be when each individual speaker costs more than a pair of Genelecs!
$685 USD is definitely expensive for a ceiling speaker, but it's about the same as 1 Genelec 8030C, not a pair :)

Personally, I'd rather ceiling mount the Genelec. But if you must have something that goes inside the ceiling, this is as good as it gets...
 

EdTice

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$685 USD is definitely expensive for a ceiling speaker, but it's about the same as 1 Genelec 8030C, not a pair :)

Personally, I'd rather ceiling mount the Genelec. But if you must have something that goes inside the ceiling, this is as good as it gets...

I bought a pair of 8030As used for $500 but you're right it's not *quite* a fair comparison. Thanks for your help and comments.
 
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