Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater VP180 vs VP160, paired with M100s

What are the opinions on the VP180 vs VP160, considering they will be paired with M100 tower speakers. I currently own the VP180 in my current system, but am putting together a basement system and was debating the VP160 instead of the VP180. I know there's lots of "chatter" about the configuration of the drivers on the VP180 vs. the more traditional configuration (W T/M W) of the VP160.

This will be placed beneath my front projection screen and the lower height profile of the VP180 might work better. I need to cover 5 seats across a single row, with only 3 seats in prime viewing spots aligned in front of the screen. The other 2 would be at significantly wider angle from the screen/center channel - particularly one of the seats.

I'm curious what the thoughts are on both speakers, particularly with their ability to provide a wider dispersion to all seats.

Thanks!

Bryan

I haven't seen any amplitude-vs-angle tests of the two speakers, but what I can say is that the VP180 seems to deliver a sufficiently wide "bubble of sound" that off-axis listeners seem to be very well covered.

Unless you plan to play at fairly low sound levels I would be tempted to stay with VP180 simply from an ability-to-be-loud-and-clean perspective. There are a fair number of movie mixes where the center channel gets as much content as the mains or even a bit more, so I see the VP180 as the perfect match for my M80 mains.

The one odd thing I noticed is that the cabinet/port tuning on the VP160 seems to give a more gentle roll-off at low frequencies, so if you are running with a very low crossover frequency to the sub the 160 *might* be desirable.

Take that with a grain of salt though, this is just a quick observation while checking the 160/180 specs to see if the measurements included a polar response graph.