Purchase SpeakerCraft AIM Wide One In-Ceiling Speaker

I have a 5.1 home theater setup in my basement living room. Full range tower speakers for the mains, and a full range center channel. I originally had the Speakercraft AIM5 ONE in the ceiling for the Left and Right Surrounds. Those are great speakers and I was very pleased, but felt like I could use a wider, fuller sound from my surrounds. The AIM WIDE is exactly what I hoped for. The sound dispersion is very wide, and it really fills the room, but still has enough direct firing characteristics that it works great with the latest digital surround sound formats from Dolby and DTS. Ideally you want your surrounds wall mounted a little above and behind the listening area, but Wife constraints make that difficult at times. These speakers create a wall of sound that you can angle in toward the listening area with the pivoting driver that I believe is the next best thing to having wall mounted surrounds.

Pick up the speaker and you can tell the construction is durable and in a whole different zip-code that most in-wall/ceiling speakers you find for bargain prices. This thing is a solid 6 inches deep or so, and that is a good thing. It virtually has it's own enclosure and you can tell just by the size of the magnet on the woofer that this thing means business and will sound great. Mounting is straightforward, involving cutting a hole with the supplied template, attaching the speaker cable to heavy duty gold spring loaded connecters, positioning the speaker in the ceiling and turning 4 screws that tighten solid built in securing claws. Due to architectural limitations, I was not able to line up the tweeters on one speaker exactly how they recommended, but have noticed no sonic difference from the other. In reality, the sound dispersion is designed to be pretty wide so it probably doesn't matter which way the tweeter assembly is rotated. With the grills on they are almost flush with the ceiling and you visually forget they are there.

Though not really pictured, the AIM WIDE ONE speaker I received has the ambient/wide switch that is pictured on the Three and Five series. I spoke with a Speakercraft tech on the phone and the best way he could describe the settings was that Wide is the "normal" setting giving you the naturally "wide" sound dispersion this speaker was designed for, while the Ambient setting makes the dual mid/high speakers a little out of phase so that the soundtrack/effects are not so directional, or makes the sound a little more diffuse and is very good for the older non-discrete surround formats like Dolby Pro-logic. If you have a newer receiver and are playing movies with a Dolby Digital/DTS soundtrack, these were engineered using discrete surround channels and the Wide setting would be your best bet in my opinion. Especially if you are playing multi-channel music, you want the Wide setting, as you do not want music audio out of phase. Again this is IMHO.

I think it's worth paying the premium for Speakercraft, for the sound quality, and especially the way they back up their product and treat you right. Call their customer support any time and you'll see what I mean. Top notch.Get more detail about SpeakerCraft AIM Wide One In-Ceiling Speaker.