Revel Salons in an enclosure?

Thanks for the opinions. It is a serious question as it involves incorporating the Salons in a HT setting. The room will be re-done by a designer and cabinet maker, I can place the Salons in Front of the Cabinets and lose some room or I can have them inside cabinets, save some space make the decor look better, also ruining its sound. An alternate is to design the cabinetry for inwalls, and place the Salons in front of then, that way if I sell the house, I just remove the Salons and re-fit the cabinets with in-walls. I have heard that it is a bad idea to place them inside cabinets but I just wanted to get the technical reason for it. I feel I owe it to the project to look further that it being a "sacrilege". I might also need to look into speakers with smaller depth. The Salons are 26" deep. I heard the Wilson WP7s are only 18" deep.

Another HT store in Montclair, CA had them this way as well. They were not functioning when I visited. The store owner said it made little difference. I am more concerned about the audio aspects.

From reading the Revel Salon manual, they said that if you got very close to one speaker, the frequency response would be the best. So in a way the frequency response might not depend on the rear tweeter if you sat at the proper location. If I allow the rear port to breath thru the rear of the cabinetry, maybe it would not effect the bass sound staging as much.

Does anyone have any technical studies or publication with measurements on this topic?

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The will not sound good, and I have heard them used as you describe. Century Stereo (in San Jose, CA) had a pair of Salons in large receases/enclosures in the wall, which had a fabric covered door. They used them in their premium home theater room. While they worked okay for HT; for music, they really did not work. The soundstaging and imaging was completely gone. The frequency response was ruined as well, as the enclosure rolled off both the treble and the bass.
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Lktanx, here is a technical explanation for you. Large free-standing speakers like the Salons and WP7s are designed to be placed far away from any room boundaries for best sound. The reason for this is only the higher frequencies radiate from the front of the speaker. Lower frequencies radiate from all sides, not just the front. If you wrap another box around the existing box, such as putting it in a cabinet, you will re-direct some of the energy from the back of the speaker toward the front of the speaker, making it sound very boomy. Treble dispersion will also be affected, which will cause imaging to suffer.

An inwall speaker is designed to be placed close to a room boundary. It intentionally has limited bass response and relies on the boundary re-inforcement to get its tonal balance right.

So, rather than trying to use a free-standing speaker in a way it was not designed to be used, why don't you use the type designed specifically for your application? The inwall type will actually sound better than the Salons built into a cabinet. Alternately, some bookshelf speakers are designed for mounting directly against a wall and would sound OK. In either case you would want to get the tweeter of the speaker as close to the front of the cabinet as possible for best dispersion.

Jeez...In my opinion you have but 2 options:

1. Fire the "Designer" and do what sounds best- after all, what good is a home theater w/Salons if they're not at their best?

2. Screw the Salons and sell them to me- cheap :)

Nighthawk, thanks for an informative answer. To follow up on this, can anyone recommend in-cabinet or in-wall speakers which sound as good as the Salons or WP7s? Thanks.