Surprisingly great!!!!

We decided to finish our basement last year, and these became part of the adventure. Well worth it! The local Best Buy rep was fast to tell me about these speakers, as we had a room that was 14' wide, by 42' long. but we didn't want to close the space down with towers. We almost went with the R3's in some shelves around our 120" projection screen, but we were worried they would get distorted being in 24"x 24"x 48" recessed shelf niches.

Since they didn't have any Ci5160's, or 30's to test, we kinda took the leap of faith with these, after listening to the R11's they had. They say that they are just like the towers, or at least based on the design of them. I am glad that we went this direction to get better sound. The B&W speakers sounded to high at times for us. This is our first jump into a better HiFi system, as we just have some Harmon Kardon wifi speakers that have been our Hi-Fi experience, and a Klipsch & Yamaha theater system upstairs, thus far. After setting up our system ( Marantz 6013 AVR, (2) 5160's, (1) 3160 ( actually, I wanted to do another 5160 as a center, but budget said no. I still made the back box the size of the 5160's just in case I can get another 5160 for there), (2) 200QL's, (4) 200QR's (atmos), and (1) 12b Sub, and (1) old Sony Sub) everything else around the house sound muffled, distorted and inferior. It was like moving up to a HD Plasma or 4k tv for the first time, and realizing that life is so much more better now.

I had fun installing them myself. We did install our front 3 speakers horizontally below the screen, instead of hiding them behind an expensive perforated screen. Since they were in a built-out / furred wall that was almost 3' out from the foundation wall (basically a small crawl space were there would be no sound compression (not sure if I am describing it technically correctly), I decided to make back boxes for most of the speakers. I used 1/2" MDF and followed the "Minimum air space requirements" that they have available to make the sizes correct for each speaker. We used Audioquest 14/4 speaker wires (twisted together) from the AVR.



Our next project is to determine if we should get more power to them via 2nd amp (Marantz or Arcam), or just upgrade to a new Denon 8500 AVR. As of right now, The system sounds GREAT as is, but could there be more to get out of these speakers....?



I laugh at this experience, as I originally went in there looking for theater speakers, and nothing more, now I find myself wanting more HiFi music experiences as well, because it sounds that great. Does that mean more clean power?, More speakers (currently running 5.2.4; but the basement is wired for 9.2.4 )? The adventure continues....!!