On-Wall Speaker Reviews

Speakers
Performance
Build Quality
Value

Subwoofer
Performance
Features
Build Quality
Value

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Dynamic sound for on- wall speakers
Versatile installation options
Solid build quality
Minus
Sub pricey compared with standalone units

THE VERDICT
PSB’s classy but low-profile PWM1 on-wall speakers and CSIR SUB subwoofer won’t attract attention, and they're not meant to. An excellent choice if you want a great-sounding speaker system for movies and music that won’t take over your room or your life.

A common notion among audiophiles who dismiss on-wall speakers is that speakers need to be positioned well out into a room in order to get big, spacious sound. But that kind of thinking misses the point. For many, on-wall speakers can be an excellent option if you don't want to dedicate your living room to a hi-fi or home theater audio system, but also expect dynamic and enveloping sound that's a step above what you'd get from in-wall speakers.

W3 On-Wall Soundbar System
Performance
Build Quality
Value

Subseries 200 Subwoofer
Performance
Features
Build Quality
Value

What do you say about a product when there’s nothing special to talk about? Let’s take, for instance, the hypothetical case of a passive LCR soundbar, a pair of matching on-wall speakers for the surrounds, and a powered subwoofer. Pretty staid and traditional stuff, that. After all, it’s a passive LCR, so there’s no extraordinary amplification technology involving cutting-edge DSP crossover and frequency manipulation in order to extract better sound out of embarrassingly small drivers than ever was possible (or desirable) before. There’s no wireless subwoofer connection to delve into, no HDMI connectivity, no onscreen display—hell, there’s not even a destined-to-disappear teeny-tiny remote control to complain about. Perhaps most disappointing from a reviewer’s perspective is the lack of any unique mess-with-your-mind faux-surround processing to wallow in the minutia of—no hyper-temporal, quasi-spatial, time-dilating series of intermodal cross-connections that takes a beautifully designed discrete multichannel soundtrack, scrambles all the elements together as if they were eggs destined for the warmed-over breakfast buffet line at Country Kitchen, but then presents it in a way that makes the end result appear (in your head) to be a delectable plate of fried eggs, sunny side up and steaming hot next to a couple of strips of crispy bacon fresh from the frying pan.

When we put together comparison tests, we often give manufacturers the parameters (i.e., outdoor speakers at $400/pair) and let them figure out what they want to send. For some reason, Niles chose to send the OS5.5, a speaker that costs just $259/pair.

Now that the weather is warm, everyone’s urge to go outside is irresistible. For you, it’s easy: Just walk out the door. For speaker manufacturers, it’s a lot harder — and not because they’re all pale geeks who never leave the lab. It’s because the outdoors is a hostile environment for anything that uses electricity. Water can corrode metal parts, or even short out circuits.

As I sit in my theater room writing this, there’s an interesting juxtaposition in front of me. On the wall are three FineLine LCR-21 speakers neatly mounted around my Samsung plasma HDTV. Now that I’m finished with my listening tests of the FineLines, I’ve hauled my next set of review speakers (a MartinLogan ElectroMotion system) into the room in order to finish burning them in. The main MartinLogan EM-ESLs are floorstanding speakers that need to be positioned out from the wall to sound best. So there it is: small, svelte, unobtrusive panels on the wall versus slender, 52-inch-tall towers (plus associated speaker wires and power cables on the floor) that are unmistakably part of an audio system.

How Perfect Can Perfect Get?

It’s always a big deal when Definitive Technology introduces a new speaker. Why? Well, as I’ve written in the past, the company has hit as many home runs as Mark McGwire—without the engineers taking any banned steroids, testosterone supplements, male-enhancement products, or vitamins. (That last part about the vitamins probably isn’t true. I’ll leave it to your imagination about the rest.) In the same way fans watched with anticipation and cameras flashed every time McGwire came up to bat, those of us who are lucky enough to do this sort of thing for a living eagerly await the chance to get our remote-control-stained hands on any new Definitive Technology speakers. Unlike with McGwire, it would be big news for the Definitive Technology team to strike out. None of us sitting in the press box really expect that to happen, though. We’re most interested in finding out how good the new speakers are going to be.