Soundbars Bring a New Design Twist to Surround Sound

​Aesthetic appeal, installation ease, and new built-in, wall-recessed options make soundbars a popular choice for home theaters and media rooms.
Soundbar speakers have forever altered the home audio landscape. For most people, it’s a welcome change. While audio purists might covet the wide soundstage produced by separate speakers and subwoofers planted throughout a room, most listeners prefer an immersive sound solution that clashes less with the room design and installs more easily.
Soundbars are the answer. Comprising technology that brings out the best of movie soundtracks, special effects and dialogue, soundbars deliver 3, 5, or even 7 channels of audio, including the latest generation of surround-sound Dolby Atmos. Soundbars are widely available from many name-brand speaker manufacturers, and most have designed their products to be both striking visually and audibly.
In a conventional installation, the soundbar remains exposed and visible, so choosing a product that suits the style of your display and the room décor is just as important as its ability to produce high-quality, realistic audio. Finding the right mate for a display isn’t hard, but for some folks, there’s an alternative worth exploring. With mounting hardware from WALL-SMART, the soundbar can be recessed completely into the wall, with only a decorative grille exposed. Here’s how this unique in-wall design compares with a standard soundbar installation:

​The Design Advantages of a Standard Soundbar Installation
When integrating a soundbar into your media room or home theater there’s no need to clear off cabinets or free up floor space. Slim, sleek, and of the perfect length for your display, one soundbar does the job of several individual surround-sound speakers. Also built into the housings of some soundbars is a subwoofer to bring out the bass, as well as an amplifier and surround-sound receiver. Everything you need is self-contained in one device, minimizing the AV clutter in your entertainment space considerably. Plus, because it’s the only component you need to plug into your display, it eliminates the tedious job of stringing multiple strands of unsightly cabling throughout the room.
Usually, the soundbar either mounts to the bottom lip of your display or rests on or inside an entertainment cabinet. Easy enough. But what happens when there’s no room to slide the soundbar into place? As skinny as they are, soundbars still need some space to stretch across a fairly wide length of cabinetry or hang beneath a display. If neither exists, furniture rearrangement could be in your future. Or, for a completely fresh aesthetic, recess the soundbar into the wall.
Specializing in custom mounting hardware that fuses technology seamlessly with walls and ceilings, WALL-SMART offers an elegant, decorative approach to soundbar installation. Exhibiting a combination of design- and technology-friendly features, the new mounts from WALL-SMART recess into the wall, creating an acoustic chamber for a soundbar. A beautiful fabric speaker grille snaps over the wall cavity, rendering the soundbar invisible and adding visual interest to the room environment. It’s a creative, elegant, cutting-edge design that sets your surround-sound system apart from those of your friends and neighbors but with all the audio performance you’d expect from a high-quality soundbar. And although WALL-SMART has customized its mounts for Arc and Beam soundbars from Sonos, they are just as accommodating of other brands. You have the freedom to use whatever soundbar you’d like—minimal matching required.
Soundbars have singlehandedly shape-shifted surround-sound environments, and WALL-SMART is altering the landscape even more with a unique installation alternative. Able to be retrofitted into a variety of wall surfaces, WALL-SMART’s mounts for soundbars take technology where it’s never been—recessed seamlessly within the wall surface where it looks more like a decorative feature than a home audio component.