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.