Typical in-wall/in-ceiling speakers use inexpensive low-performance drivers. They may even be dressed up with impressive looking cones or domes to make you think they are engineered designs, but nothing could be further from truth. These speakers not only have poor sound, they also have poor dispersion resulting in sonic hot spots — too much sound in one part of the room and not enough in another.

Pivoting the woofer and tweeter is no better. Pivoting the woofer and tweeter in different directions will result in listeners hearing drastically different frequency responses—it’s impossible to have accurate sound with these drivers aimed in different directions. Pivoting the woofer and tweeter in the same direction doesn’t solve the problem either. Since these systems beam sound to sonic hot spots (like a spotlight), pivoting the woofer and tweeter in tandem will simply move the sonic hot spot to another area of the room.

Pivoting tweeters don’t address the problem (they generally have wider dispersion already). The problem of poor dispersion is in the midrange-tweeter interface. To accommodate the pivoting mechanism a small low-power plastic encapsulated tweeter is required, which necessitates a higher crossover to prevent thermal failure. Upper midrange must then be reproduced by the woofer, which becomes directional (beams) in that region. Pivoting the tweeter will aim high-frequency sound toward listeners, but the all-important midrange will not reach them. The result is a progressively “ sucked-out” midrange and bright, screechy high frequencies.

Paradigm® in-wall/in-ceiling speakers use superior high-performance, high-power drivers. Where applicable we even use heatsinks on our high-frequency drivers for higher power handling. This allows us to use lower crossover points and ensure wide dispersion (see pages 8 – 9). Sonic hotspots are eliminated— every listener hears superb imaging at volume levels that are equal throughout the room. Because we have addressed the root of the problem—wide dispersion through the upper midrange—pivoting drivers are simply not required.