Niles Blueprint BG525 Installation Manual

MODEL

BG525

B LENDING H IGH F IDELITY AND A RCHITECTURE

®

INSTALLATION & OPERATION GUIDE

MODEL

BG525

BACKGROUND

®

®

Congratulations!

Thank you for choosing a Blueprint Series®In-Wall Loudspeaker from Niles.
With proper installation and operation, you'll enjoy years of trouble-free use.

Niles manufactures the industry's most complete line of custom installation
components and accessories for audio/video systems. For a free full-line catalog
write: Niles, Catalog Request, P.O. Box 160818, Miami, Florida 33116-0818

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 2

FEATURES AND BENEFITS 2

INSTALLATION CONSIDERATIONS 4

SPEAKER PLACEMENT 6

INSTALLATION FUNDAMENTALS 8

INSTALLATION OF BRACKETS, FRAMES AND GRILLES IN NEW CONSTRUCTION 13

INSTALLATION OF BRACKETS, FRAMES AND GRILLES IN EXISTING WALLS 15

INSTALLATION OFTHE SPEAKER A N D GRILLE INNEW OR EXISTING CONSTRUCTION 16

OPERATION 18

SPECIFICATIONS 1 8

LIMITED W ARRANTY 19

W ARRAN TY REGIS TRATION CARD 20

2

Features and Benefits

Introduction

The BG Background group of Blueprint
Series

®

Loudspeakers offers a product
expressly designed for quality back­ground music reproduction. This speaker
is perfect for hallways, laundry rooms,
entryways or other areas where critical
listening is unlikely and cost is a major
influence in the purchase decision.

A complete, installed pair of BG-525
In-Wall Loudspeakers consists of
three components:

1. BG-525 Speaker

2. 525 Bracket Kit

3. 525 Frame/Grille Kit

Features and Benefits

PointSource™ Full-Range Driver

The PointSource driver of the BG -525 is
constructed with a woven fiber cone sup­ported by a treated foam surround. This
gives the driver rigidity for fast transients.
The frequency response curve of the
PointSource driver has been carefully
shaped for Background Music reproduc­tion. It has a rich sound much more suit­able for low volume listening than tradi­tional speakers. The single driver configu­ration gives effective coverage over a wide
area allowing great latitude in terms of
speaker placement.

X-Matrix™ Reinforced Baffle

The X-Matrix baffle design uses specially
molded ribs to add rigidity to the baffle
assembly. The end result is better bass and
improved midrange detail.

Absolutely Flush to the Wall
Appearance

The unique mounting system of the BG
loudspeakers powerfully clamps the frame
to the bracket, sandwiching the wall mate­rial between them. Because the clamping
action is totally uniform around the frame,
there are no shadows or gaps between the
wall and the frame. Additionally, the Niles
mounting system is carefully optimized to
stiffen the surrounding drywall and pre­vent it from resonating. You hear only the
music, not the drywall.

Easy Retrofit Installation in your
Existing Home

Designed for ease of installation, the Niles
mounting system makes retrofit installa­tions simple and fast. A supplied template
assures fast and accurate hole cutting. The
bracket slips behind the drywall and the
screws secure the frame to the bracket,

sandwiching the drywall between them.
The speaker baffle attaches to the frame,
and the grille mounts over the speaker.

Three Stage Installation System for
Remodels or New Construction

You install only the parts you need for a
particular stage of construction. When the
framing and wiring are finished, you
install the

bracket

. After the drywall is up,
but before the painter begins to paint, you
install the

frame

and provide the rustproof

aluminum

grilles

to the painter so that
they can be painted to match the sur­roundings. Only when construction is
completely finished do you put the valu­able

speaker

in the wall. You don’t have
to mask or prep the speaker for painting,
and worries about theft during the final
phases of construction are never an issue!

Eight Ohm Impedance

The speakers are designed to be placed in
multi-room systems with many pairs of
speakers. The eight ohm impedance is a
very easy electrical load for most ampli­fiers. This allows many pairs of BG speak­ers to be wired to a single amplifier using
a Niles speaker selection system.

Low Diffraction, Paintable Aluminum
Grilles

BG speakers are available with aluminum
grilles. The painted aluminum grille has
hundreds of precisely sized perforations,
creating an acoustically transparent grille.

Infrared Sensor Mount

The speaker baffle has a locator designed
for the Niles MS-1 MicroSensor,™ a
miniature infrared sensor. The MS-1
installs discreetly behind the aluminum
grille and therefore minimizes wall clut­ter in your home. When you want to
control your equipment, you simply
point your remote control at the speaker
from up to 15 feet away .

Features and Benefits

3

Recommended Amplifier Power

For satisfactory performance, we recom­mend an amplifier with a power rating of
five to fifty watts for the BG-525.
Curiously, most speakers are not damaged
by large amplifiers but by small amplifiers.
If your system is playing loudly, a small
amplifier will run out of power very quick­ly. When an amplifier runs out of power it
creates damaging “clipping” distortion. A
large amplifier will play at the same vol­ume without distorting. See the section on
operating the speakers for more informa­tion about clipping distortion.

Incorporating a Local Volume Control

In a multi-room system there is one indis­pensible control for true convenience —a
local volume control. It allows you to
adjust the volume of the speakers without
leaving the room.

Plan to wire the system so that each pair
of speakers has its own volume control
built into the wall (think of a volume con­trol as a dimmer switch for sound).

Niles makes a wide range of high perfor­mance indoor and outdoor volume con­trols. They are available in Standard or
Decora

®

style cover plates (just like your

4

Installation Considerations

Figure 1

New Construction Wings
Bracket

Frame

SpeakerBaffle

IR Knockout

Grille

Installation Considerations

light switches and dimmers). Volume con­trols are connected in line with the speak­er, so you must connect the wire from the
amplifier to the volume control and then
from the volume control to the speaker.

Speaker Wire

Use 2-conductor speaker wire when con­necting BG speakers to your receiver or
amplifier. For most applications, we rec­ommend you use 16 or 18 gauge wire.
For wiring runs longer than 80 feet we
recommend 14 gauge wire. The spring
loaded terminals of the BG speakers will
accommodate up to 14 gauge wire
directly. Larger sizes can be accommodat­ed via pin connectors.

When you run wire inside walls, special
jacketing (CL-2 or CL-3) is required to
both protect the wire and for fire preven­tion. In some areas conduit is required.
For a trouble-free installation, low voltage
wire, such as speaker wire, must be run in
accordance with the National Electrical
Code and any applicable provisions of the
local building code. If you are unsure of
the correct installation techniques, wire
jacket or type of conduit to use, consult a
professional audio /video installer, your
building contractor, or the local building
and inspection department.

Incorporating a Remote Control

If you are planning to use a stereo system
with a hand held IR remote control, con­sider the advantages of installing a Niles
IR Repeater system. You are able to con-

trol all of the functions of your system
from the room with the remote pair of
speakers. Niles makes a number of IR sen­sors which install in the wall, in the ceiling,
in cabinetry, on tabletops, or even behind
the grille of your Niles BG speakers.

An IR sensor requires that a dedicated
2-conductor shielded wire (West Penn
D291 or equivalent) run from each sensor
location to the main equipment location.
This wire is normally run beside the
speaker wire at the same time. Typically,
the sensor is placed in a location that
faces your listening position. Most remote
controls will have an effective line of sight
range of 18 to 30 feet with any Niles sen-

sor placed in a wall, ceiling, on a cabinet
or tabletop. However, when you place a
Niles MS-1 MicroSensor behind the perfo­rated aluminum grille of a speaker the
effective range is reduced to 9 to 15 feet.

Insulating the Wall Cavity

For best performance from your speakers
fill the wall cavity behind the speaker
with fiberglass insulation (e.g. R-19 unbat­ted insulation). Try to keep the same
amount of insulation for each speaker,
particularly in the same room, for consis­tent bass response.

5

Installation Considerations

TECH TIP

Wire size is expressed by its AWG (American Wire

Gauge) number. The lower the number, the larger

the wire, i.e. twelve AWG is physically larger than

fourteen AWG.

6

Speaker Placement

The Boundary Effect

Corners can affect the bass response of
the speaker powerfully! This is called the
boundary effect. You will emphasize par­ticular bass frequencies and cancel out
other bass frequencies when you place
speakers close to the wall/ceiling bound­ary or a corner wall boundary. This can
make the speaker sound excessively
boomy and inaccurate to some listeners,
while to others it just seems like more
bass sound. A good rule of thumb is if
you always listen to your current pair of
speakers with the bass turned up, you’ll
enjoy corner placement. If you keep your
tone controls at neutral, try to keep the
speakers at least one or two feet from the
boundaries of the room.

Placement for Varying Listening
Positions

If you want the freedom to sit anywhere
in a room facing any direction, and/or
find that you prefer the “all around you”
sound of some car stereos to a conven­tional “sound stage” facing you, consider
the speaker placement techniques profes­sional installers use in restaurants and
bars. They place speakers in an array
around the listening area, so that the
music is always surrounding you, regard­less of the direction you face.

The rule of thumb is to add one pair of
speakers for every 100 to 200 square feet
of listening area. Curiously, this is not so
that you can play the music louder, but
so that you can play it softer! When you
have only one pair of speakers in a large
room you will notice that when the
sound is perfect in one part of the room,
it is too loud near the speakers. By plac­ing more than one pair in the room you
will avoid these “hot spots” of loud

sound and you will create still more
sonic ambiance while maintaining clarity
and a rich sound everywhere.

You can make listener position still less
critical by using mono rather than stereo.
This can be difficult to achieve with nor­mal stereo amplifiers. However, Niles
manufactures Systems Integration
Amplifiers which enable one room to be
wired in stereo while other rooms are
wired in mono. Consult your local Niles
dealer for more information.

In smaller rooms or rooms that are infre­quently used, you typically can’t justify
the expense of more than two speakers.
Try to bracket the room with the two
speakers. Diagonal placement is a very
effective way to stretch the coverage pat­tern of two speakers. You can also com­promise between direct sound (for detail
and clarity) and reflected sound (the
ambient or “all around you” effect). By
trying to place the speakers so that they
create as much reflected sound as possi­ble, you emphasize the ambient effect.
They can be up high in the wall or even
down low at power outlet height, in the
ceiling, near corners, or directed at
reflective objects and walls. The more
reflected sound there is in the room the
stronger the ambient effect at low vol­umes. You should use moderation, how­ever, otherwise the compromise becomes
too one sided and at high volumes the
sound will be blurred and less distinct.

Placement for Rear Home Theater
Applications

In a home theater, the goal is to repro­duce the experience of a great movie the­ater in our homes. The biggest difference
between the two is the rear or surround
speaker array in a commercial theater.
Here, it is not uncommon to see twenty
or thirty speakers around the audience.

Speaker Placement