 A whole home sound system is one of those things that used to only be achievable by people with way too much money on their hands. But nowadays, you can dot your house with Amazon Echoes, get it, connect them to powered speakers and have music in every room to enjoy while you cook, clean, or have RGB dance parties. Of course, not everyone wants to see the wires or even the speakers for that matter. So today's video is going to be about, on a budget, converting my Sonos setup to one that can be hidden away in my ceiling. Not quite like that. And it's gonna be brought to you by Honey. Honey is the free web browser extension that will find you the best promo codes on shopping sites like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and more. Get it today at joinhoney.com slash LTT. So in my review six years ago, I praised the convenience and reliability of Sonos' wireless audio gear, but criticized the quality of the integrated speakers. To be clear, they're fine, but for pick your ears, Sonos has a solution anyway. Their amp lineup of products allows you to connect your own speakers to their app for easy wireless streaming and control. So let's just go ahead and grab an amp and a couple of in ceiling. Oh my goodness. Each room is gonna cost me, even with the bundle savings, over 1200 US dollars in amps and speakers. Surely I can do better than that, right? Yes. Yes, I can. One of my other criticisms of Sonos was their high prices. Although to their credit, they've actually done a pretty darn good job of supporting their products. If you don't mind using their S1 or legacy app, you can pick up a connect amp, which is the older version of the amp for as little as $250. That's a product from 2008 that is still usable today without any kind of subscription fee. That's actually a rarity among IoT device makers. If you have other newer gear though, you're gonna wanna watch out and get one that is compatible with the S2 app. So that's one that was made in March 2014 or newer. So for example, I've actually got this Sonos Arc, their new soundbar. I'm working on a review of that. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss it. So I needed to make sure that all of my gear was S2 ready. For that, I ended up spending around $370 a unit for two more connect amps. Although I still think that's pretty good bang for the buck, especially when you consider how well Sonos gear tends to hold its value and the fact that they often offer generous upgrade programs so you can consider that investment in the legacy product as sort of a discount on your new one when you do eventually have to upgrade. On the speaker side of things, I actually ended up very pleasantly surprised. I ordered these Polk Audio RC80i's from Amazon thinking that there was only one speaker in the box but as it turns out, it's actually just $165 US for not one, but two in-ceiling speakers. Here we go. My kids are getting in-ceiling speakers in their bedroom. One cool feature of these speakers is if you pop the grill, you can actually redirect the tweeter slightly according to where you think your audience is going to end up. And given I've already got a pair of them installed in my living room, I can say with confidence that you'll be pretty surprised actually, especially for the price, by the sound quality you get out of these things. The best part of it, of course though, is that for less than the price of a brand new amp, I have got my last generation S2 compatible connect amp and a pair of speakers to install in this room. That's half price, baby. So the story behind this room is this is actually two rooms. What you're looking at up on the ceiling is what used to be the closets for each of the rooms and at some point they may become two rooms again. That's why this single room got two air conditioning units. So it'd be nice if we could just do a single speaker in each room. Did we figure out what the deal was? Like why it didn't fit right away? Cause see, there's the two different layers. We're not painting it, so we should be popping out the outer layer. We should be taking that. It's tight, yeah. It's perfect. Really tight. Okay, so where do you want it then? Keep in mind, these things have to come out. So that's how they anchor down. So it needs to be able to touch the drywall. So it can't be right next to the stud. A little more than three inches. It's like so close though. Does that look good? Yeah, it looks great. Okay, I am actually concerned about that one because these things are what hold it in place. And if the drywall is already cracked there, I don't think it's gonna be structurally good enough to hold it in place. This is like two or three pounds. No, it's more than two or three pounds. This is more than two to three pounds. It's from 117 to 112. So, okay, five pounds. 5.8 pounds. Okay, and also I feel like I need to set the record straight. People thought I bought this leopard print stuff. What? I bought it. I'm obviously a stylish guy. Oh yeah. Ow, balls. For those wondering, the reason we're cutting it from the bottom side is that actually the reason for this whole bullet hole situation over there was that it was cut from the top, which can be a lot messier. So this is to get a nice clean hole. Always make sure you got a clean hole. Oh boy. What did I marry? For those who didn't catch it, I unplugged this before doing what I'm doing with the blade before you guys re-it me. Oh boy, you missed by a lot. All right, woo, circle-ish. So good thing the electrical cable here is an armored one. See, Brian knew who he was dealing with. This one in first. Oh yeah. Nice. What kind of screwdriver bit does it use? This cross. Cross. Okay. All right. That's in there. Oh, wait, yeah it is. You're on suck duty. Oh, my nipple. Oh yeah. Wow, it's so tight. It even just like sticks there. Now all that remains is to run speaker wire under here. Well, you guys aren't gonna be able to see this, I'm afraid, but they go into the back of the speaker kind of like a speaker. Now I'm just going to, don't worry, not gonna put this down all the way or anything, but I just wanna hold it kinda in place. That's good enough. I've got a couple of outlets in my attic that I'm no longer using for anything since Brian wired in proper lights here a little while ago. So I'm just gonna plug two of these puppies. One of these connect amps per room. I'm just gonna plug them into power here and then probably realistically, I'm just gonna throw like a piece of two by six or something on top of the insulation or maybe I'll just make a little shelf right here. And I'm just gonna chuck them right here. Just pop that through there. And this thing should pick up and I should be able to press play. So let's go ahead and just grab some music here. That's a good sign. Let's run downstairs. Which way do you want them pointed? Maybe one right here where my hand is and then one like where the bean bag is over there. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Yay, yes, they're both working. Okay, nice. Okay, now let's have a look at what kind of sound quality we get if we don't care about saving any money and we were to spend like as much if not, actually more than Sonos's own speakers on the in-ceiling speaker component. Do you want square or do you want circle for your grill? Oh, these are adjustable too. Okay, nevermind, nevermind. So these just have a different mechanism for adjusting the angle that they sit at. I mean, that's fine because depending where we wanna put it, we might just want to like, this would be for like a home theater setup where you'd wanna angle it towards the listener. But here we might just put it in the corner of the room and then just kind of angle it out towards the room because we're just putting a single speaker in here. Sorry, sorry, audiophile people. Can we hide it in that corner? Yeah, so we're gonna wanna angle it kinda like that. Nope, can't do it there. Oh, why? There's a joist like right here. So basically, or like here. So it'd have to be like right there. And there's a big thing around it, like it's not gonna fit. Okay, well, what if you do that? So we'd have to come out to like here. The speaker is actually really heavy. It's a good thing that the mounting mechanism is separate from it. You just pop this in first and then put this in and then turn it to lock it. Pretty cool. Woo! It's actually really nice that this one has it open like that. Yeah, you can do it all from this side. Oh yeah, that's sweet. All right, let's see how this one sounds. You know, I might actually like the look of the grills on the other one better. I was just talking to Annie about that because the other ones have a ring around them so they almost didn't. This one matches everything else. Yeah. Yeah, okay. It's a lot better. It's a lot more clear. Well, yeah, yeah. It's way better. I don't know if I would pay six times as much or whatever that works out too, but. Are you sure? Because you do that for your computer speakers and stuff. Maybe you would. Definitely a lot better. Okay. Blinkist takes the best insights and most important information from thousands of non-fiction books and condenses them into 15 minutes. 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