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Full user review
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4.5 stars
"Extraordinary performer for the price (paid about $130/pr)"
Pros: Quality build, easy installation, adjustable tweeter & midrange output; swiveling tweeter
Cons: As with any in-wall, bass won't create much of a seismic event in your home unless you add a subwoofer.
Summary: I have installed and enjoyed eight pairs of these speakers?six pairs in my current home and two pairs in my last house. As one might suppose, I would not have invested in six pairs for my current home unless I had been very favorably impressed by my earlier experiences with this speaker model.
Sound is very smooth overall, and bass ranges from respectable to surprisingly robust?depending largely on the location of the installation. I have installed these in walls?both insulated and un-insulated?as well as in ceilings. Because the placement (both wall versus ceiling as well as the acoustic characteristics of the room) can make the sound vary substantially, these speakers benefit greatly from the presence of adjustable output of the midrange driver and tweeter. And attenuating the volume on both of those drivers effectively increases the relative output of the eight-inch woofer. So in an acoustically reflective room with hard floors and few sound-absorbing furnishings, the tweeter can be reined in to keep the sound from sizzling. Likewise, in an acoustically absorbent environment, or where these speakers are used in conjunction with a sub-woofer, one might want the tweeter and midrange cranked.
The swiveling tweeter enables the speakers to be aimed, even though one cannot easily angle the walls in which the speakers are installed. The tweeter do not swivel by more than about 30 degrees, so this feature does not provide unlimited latitude, but it certainly helps put the ?sweet spot? where desired in most rooms.
Power handling is excellent, but so is the speakers? ability to make efficient use of power. I have two pairs installed in my dedicated home theater, where my relatively high-end Denon receiver cranks 130 watts per channel into these speakers with very good results. But I also have four pairs installed in various rooms of my house?all connected to a whole-house audio system. In those installations, I use a reasonably high quality 100 watt per channel receiver, which then splits its signal six ways through a speaker patch panel and impedance-matching volume controls for each pair of speakers. So each pair of speakers receives only about 16 watts per channel. I can tell no obvious difference in sound quality from the 130-watt installation to the 16-watt installation. They perform beautifully in both cases.
While these speakers will not leave you in a state of bass deprivation, a subwoofer complements them beautifully. In two rooms of the whole-house audio installation, I have run speaker-level outputs from the wall-mounted volume controls to 50-watt Polk Audio powered subwoofers. This enables the subwoofer to attenuate its volume along with the speakers in response to the wall-mounted volume control. The subwoofer?s speaker-level outputs then go out to the speakers. The beauty of this installation is that the VI-38s do so well on bass down to about 80 Hz, so the subwoofer?s crossover can be set very low, thereby allowing the subwoofer to do what it does best, while also getting a pleasant full-range sound field from the Bic VI-38s.
My experience suggests that better bass is obtained?not surprisingly?when the VI-38s are installed in a wall with a closed back. That is to say that installation in a ceiling with an open attic space overhead or in a wall with no drywall on the other side (such as in a room adjoining unfinished basement areas) seems to produce slightly inferior results, but just slightly.
Finally, note that prices for these varies considerably. They can be had from reputable online vendors for under $130 per pair, but Buy.com (perhaps in response to the huge number of these that I have purchsed there in the past!) has raised the price from $130-ish to $254.49 per pair. So it now pays to do some careful comparison shopping.
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