IWTS-14 LCR-IP

The IWTS-14 LCR-IP represents an entirely new approach to medium-priced in-wall speakers. We've thrown out all the old ways of doing things, and started fresh.

First of all, these speakers do not use conventional plastic baffles. While plastic is a perfectly acceptable material for modestly-priced speakers, it has no place on the materials roster of a premium-performance loudspeaker. Look at the cabinets of the best audiophile free-standing speakers: they're made out of resonant-free MDF, and for good reason. MDF gives the drivers a very solid "footing" from which to launch their acoustic energy. All the drivers' sound is sent cleanly into the room, and none is wasted as extraneous panel vibration.

The second thing that sets these speakers apart is their use of Atlantic's Low Resonance Tweeter LRT(tm). In-wall speakers tend to be mounted high up on the wall, above the sightline. Yet a seated listener's ears are only 35-40 inches above the floor. To compensate, other companies use some variation of a mechanical "pivot" device to try to aim the tweeter down at the listeners. This is a bad idea for two reasons: First, conventional tweeters don't play the directionally-important midrange frequencies. They only play the upper treble. The woofer--mounted far above the listener's head--plays the midrange and beams it like a flashlight over your ears. So you can angle the tweeter down all you want, but the important midrange vocals and on-screen effects stay frustratingly out of direct earshot.

The other bad thing about a so-called "pivoting tweeter" is that when you swivel it, you introduce a ledge that physically interferes with the tweeter's output. This diffraction causes acoustic "smearing" that blurs the clear transmission of the treble tones.

Our Low Resonance Tweeter solves these problems completely. By using a drawn-aluminum rear chamber, we've lowered the tweeter's resonant frequency by more than an octave, allowing it to respond far down into the midrange. This means the tweeter--not the woofer--handles the upper midrange. Since small tweeters have much wider dispersion than large woofers, the IWTS-7 and 14 LCR sound great, even when they're mounted high above ear level.

By carefully manipulating the crossover design, our engineers have discovered how to actually direct the sound up or down electronically--without mechanical pivot devices. Therefore, in addition to the already wide dispersion of the LRT, if it's necessary to direct the sound down even further, the Directional Vector Control will do it without any drawbacks or mechanically-induced interference.

The IWTS-14 LCR is what we call a 2 1/2-way design: Both woofers handle the bass for great power-handling and high output, but one rolls off quickly and the other one continues on up to meet the tweeter. Having only one woofer play into the midrange results in cleaner sound than if both played in the midrange, and it also optimizes the operation of the Directional Vector Control.