I’ve been meaning to write this up for a while but the project was only completed this week. I was resigned to not being able move to Atmos as the installation of height speakers in the ceiling was not sufficiently wife friendly and I wasn’t overly convinced that upward firing height speakers would be to my liking.
Then one day I stumbled across a Youtube video titled “How To Build "The World's Best Speakers" - Are Flat Panel Speakers Really Any Good?” The guy started out claiming he was skeptical, but then goes through the process of building a pair of these. If you’re interested you can search Youtube for the phrase “world’s best speaker” and you’ll find other examples of people building and testing them. Here’s the link to the original video:
Anyway, I figured I may be able to swing an easily reversable “ceiling mount” solution as opposed to cutting holes for permanent speakers with the good wife. Further investigation showed that they are relatively easy to assemble and are really quite cheap – around US$50 per pair. They cost me AU$95 all up here in Oz.
Each speaker consists of one 600mm x 600mm (2ft x 2ft) XPS panel about 40mm or 1.6” thick. XPS stands for eXtruded PolyStyrene and is a building material commonly used as in-wall insulation. This material is extremely stiff but also extremely light which makes it perfect as a rigid sound source. My local hardware store carries them in 1200mm x 600mm sheets which is then cut in two for the two speakers. Remember, these are just panels – we’re not using them to construct speaker boxes. After preparing the panels (see the above Youtube video) you attach to each one a self adhesive “DAYTON 32MM SOUND EXCITER 40W”. This is the device that vibrates or ‘excites’ the entire panel which in turn produces the sound. It’s somewhat akin to the magnet assembly of a standard speaker but instead of attaching to a cone it bonds with the XPS panel.
Do they work? Yes, surprisingly well.
Do they sound any good? Much better than I expected however they are bass shy. This is not a problem in a setup with a subwoofer as you can set them to small in your AVR and set an appropriate crossover point. You can hear them in the above video but be aware that the bass in person is better than it sounds there. The guy may be using a phone microphone because it doesn’t come out too well. But when I tested them as stereo speakers with a sub the sound was more than acceptable.
Now my system is not the highest of high end, but my current AVR/speaker setup cost around AU$8,000 so it’s quite capable of great sound. Using the XPS speakers as height speakers and calibrating them with Yamaha’s YPAO has them fitting in with the other components nicely in the 5.1.2 configuration. Here’s a picture of what the final install looks like. NB the exposed wires may be going into the ceiling eventually. The setup now sounds awesome with the appropriate content, for example Yello’s ‘Point’!