These are one of the most important devices in an in ceiling speaker system.
These are speaker containment boxes for new and renovated ceiling speaker installations.
They are installed in your ceilings between the joists BEFORE the dry wall is applied. They provide the ideal “box” for the in ceiling speaker to operate in, thus providing the best performance for the speaker. If you don’t have containment housings the back of the speaker fires sound out the back, with the same volume as what comes out the front, into the open joist space above your finished ceiling. This sound travels between floors, interferes with other ceiling speakers in the array and causes all sorts of nasty problems when you try to “tune” the system. It also makes listening to the system when someone is sleeping virtually impossible! A speaker containment box reduces the room to room transmission of sound by more than 20 decibels (that’s a lot) and allows the speaker to perform the way it should.
There is also the safety factor to consider. In ceiling speakers usually have speakers made of some sort of plastic or polypropylene that have a very low melting point. If, God forbid, you ever had a fire in the room that has in ceiling speakers these speakers melt, creating a chimney for the fire to whisk it’s way to the next floor! Not if you have containment housings. The housings have a fire rating far in excess of the rating of the gyproc or blue board that is on the ceiling – so, no chimney!
But the best advantage that these boxes provide is the clean, easy and fast installation of the speakers after the room is painted. If you just have speaker wires sticking out of the ceiling your electronics contractor has to guess where they can cut a hole in the ceiling in order to install the speaker. It’s a time consuming and messy proposition – the money that you spend on containment boxes will more than pay for the extra labour charges you will incur if the contractor has to cut the drywall to install the speaker!
At Wired 1 Consulting we strongly recommend containment housings. They make a HUGE difference!
If your electronics contractor is not offering fire rated containment boxes – you now know who does!