In-celing summed mono vrs stereo pair ?

[JohnESwanson]

I am building a new home and would like to configure it for whole house audio. My local home audio installer uses Posh or BIC speakers. I am a big fan of Klipsch, so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that they have a full line of in-ceiling and in-wall speakers.

I am considering SCR-2s or SCR-3s in some rooms, and CS-650-RSM (summed mono) in others. The local home audio expert tells me that the summed mono (plays L & R combined) is a good choice for small rooms (eg. bathroom) or rooms without a well defined listening area (eg. kitchen/dinnette area). This seems like a good idea. It avoids having the listener only hear one channel in one half of the room and the other when in the half of the room. One worry though, is that the CS-650-RSM is so much cheaper that I wonder if it will sound any good at all. At its low price point, I wonder if it was designed for elevator usage? Would I be better off buying a stereo pair (SCR-2 or SCR-3) and placing them relatively close together. Does anyone have any first hand experience with these speakers (SCR-2, SCR-3, CS-650-RSM) ? Opinions on these speakers or on stereo pair versus summed mono for a room?

Thanks!

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John S.

[Tom Adams]

I'm glad you asked this question John because I've been re-thinking lately what I did. I hope my thoughts about this are clear (which is a tall order for me sometimes ) and that it helps your decision making.

When my home was in the initial stages, I too made plans for audio in various rooms and for outside. And like you, my choice was to use Klipsch speakers. At the time, my focus was stereo, not sure why I didn't consider mono, but I didn't. As a result, due to cost constraints, I paired back my house audio to just having speakers in the Master Bedroom and outside. My logic was that most other rooms in the house could be filled by sound from my main system. So, the house gets built and SCW1's are mounted in the MB ceiling.

Being blessed with perfect 20/20 <ahem> hindsight, I now wished that, for the same money, I would've used a single mono speaker in the MB and a single mono speaker in the MB bath. Don't get me wrong, the stereo sound is great from these speakers, but the only time you can enjoy the stereo sound is when you're lying in bed and how many of us do our critical listening in bed? And for the record, by critical listening, I'm referring to music and not our spouses speaking to us. .

MHO is that for the vast majority of us, our main system is the one we use to really listen to music & whatever. And the music for other rooms is background music. And in that regard, mono's would be a better choice and allow more rooms to have audio given an equal budget.

BTW, installation of my SCW1's was a snap. A bit messy having to cut sheetrock - but a snap nonetheless.

Tom Adams