About a year ago I started work on converting an under utilized and fairly large bedroom into my next home theater. The goal was to have a room that would serve as my office and library during the day and become a reasonably high performance theater when the blackout curtains were drawn. Since I wanted to conceal as much of the gear as possible, I decided I should go with active speakers. I really liked the JBL 708P which offered the level of performance I wanted in a relatively compact package.
I got to work drawing up plans. My idea from the start was to incorporate the speakers into bookcases and have a screen come down in front of them. The room is 13' 6" by 20'. Due to doors and windows, the only option was to place the screen on the long wall which meant the throw distance of my projector dictated I couldn't have bookcases any deeper than 12" on the screen wall. This was a problem. The shelves themselves would be 11" deep and the 708Ps are 11 1/2" deep before any cables are attached and no toe in is applied. I considered the 705Ps, but the performance hit was greater than I wanted to accept. (In an ideal world I would be going with M2s or Meyer Sound Acheron Designers, but they are both way too big to hide in a large bedroom!)
Obviously the next step for me was to consider custom DIY designs... since I wanted to use a compression driver up top and preferably a 2" or larger driver at that, everything I came up with was also too large. During this time I installed some Meyer Sound Ultra-X20s for a project at work. Before installing them I brought a pair home to test and was quite favorably impressed. These speakers are extremely compact for their capabilities and the imaging is extremely good. The speakers are a D'Apolito design with a 2" compression driver sitting between a pair of purpose built 5" woofers. One of the design features is a rotatable horn which allows the speaker to be used either vertically or horizontally.
After deciding to go with the Ultra-X20s, I needed to sort out my subwoofer situation. I had a Revel B112 I planned on using tucked under my desk in the room's corner, but I wanted to augment it primarily for smoothing out the bass response in the room. I added a pair of very unusual in-wall subs. Artison RCC-320 Mk2s. These subs are tiny, but pack a heck of a punch and are quite "musical" as well... (not one note bass). For the surrounds I decided to go with the shockingly tiny Meyer Sound MM-4XP. These speakers look like something Bose might have conjured up, but they are neutral, wide bandwidth, and will exceed Dolby or DTS reference levels in a room my size. They do compromise the upper bass in that they roll off below 135Hz, but for surround duty, I am willing to accept that.
My surround processor of choice for most home theaters is to go with one of the Lyngdorf surround processors with Lyngdorf's Room Perfect room correction. Since I will never use more than 12 channels in this room, the MP40 was the logical choice. Amplification... the Meyers are all active and use an outboard DC power supply. The Revel B112 has a plate amp— fingers crossed it will last. The Artison subs do require a dedicated amp so I do have a 1U 1000watt amp in the rack, but that's it. With this setup I was able to tuck everything in a tiny rack in my closet and satisfy the hidden equipment requirement.
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