• $397/ea.
• Two-way with an 8" bass driver and pivoting tweeter, configurable as passive design powered by a conventional amplifier or as a "remote active" system driven by a proprietary Meridian crossover/amplifier

Released from the boxes of thousands upon thousands of plasma and LCD TVs was a nasty disease that's induced feverish thoughts of flatness and smallness in the minds of otherwise good and decent people, making them forget how important audio is to a home theater system. (That rumbling sound is Paul Klipsch rolling over in his grave.) For these poor, deluded folks, speakers are not much more than a flat-panel-TV accessory.

The loudspeaker sat in his doctor's examining room. His weight was up, and the results of the cholesterol test were not good.

Transcend Music Reproduction

If you’re a home theater enthusiast or audio purist who follows the high-end speaker market, you’re probably familiar with Pioneer’s line of TAD loudspeakers and their reputation for exquisite sound reproduction. It all started with the TAD Model-1, which drew rave reviews with its concentrically aligned beryllium midrange and tweeter. Priced at $45,000 per pair, they were obtainable for only the wealthiest audiophiles.

It seems that all new consumer electronics products are either digital, Web-based, or both. One of the last holdouts are loudspeakers, which still operate mainly in the analog domain with no Web-based functions. Polk Audio has broken from that mold with the LC265i-IP in-wall loudspeaker. The LC265i-IP is the first active in-wall speaker for home audio powered by digital amplifiers that you can control via an Internet Protocol (IP)–based system. The full package, including the speakers, resides on a local area network, similar to the way a PC resides on a larger network connected to the Internet. The IP control assigns a unique number, or address, to each component in the system. The speakers in my test sample were connected to a NetStreams DigiLinX audio distribution system, which distributes digital audio throughout a networked home. Although I used the DigiLinX system for the purpose of this review, Polk Audio designed the LC265i-IP speakers to be compatible with a variety of IP-capable audio distribution systems, which are certainly a growing trend in wholehouse audio and video systems.

To the casual observer, the home theater world probably looks relatively homogenous. After all, home theater isn't big enough, established enough, or varied enough to break itself into endless sub-categories yet, is it? The truth is, categorization has been a part of home theater from the beginning, and the gap between its two main sub-categories—let's call them conventional products and custom-install products—is wide. When it comes to speakers, the gap is only getting wider.