The general public seems to think that all audio/video gear is cranked out in huge factories with automated machinery, and that theirs are the first human hands that have ever touched the products they buy. They're mostly right-but there are exceptions. The cabinets for the speakers I'm reviewing this month were built not in a huge factory, but in a shop in Napa, California, that has more in common with Orange County Choppers than it does with a Chinese production line.

James Loudspeaker's in-wall speakers are made much as a racecar might be-from welded aluminum. Aluminum offers several advantages over the molded plastic used to fabricate most in-walls. First, it's stiffer than most plastics, so it's less likely to color the sound by vibrating in sympathy with the music or movies you're enjoying. And second, it's heavier than most plastics. Weight in an in-wall speaker is a good thing-the heavier the speaker, the less likely the wall it's mounted in will vibrate.

We reviewed some earlier James Loudspeaker in-walls a few years ago, and while we liked the sound, we thought some might consider them unfashionably bulky. (Even with in-wall speakers, designers prefer small, slim grilles.) The speakers in the company's new FX line are considerably slimmer; the 65FX and 62FX that we recently received for review measure less than 10 inches wide. They also feature the latest fashion trend in in-walls: a slim bezel. It's only about three-eighths of an inch wide-half the width of the bezels on most in-wall speakers.

Both speakers use the same polypropylene-cone woofer and fabric-dome tweeter; the difference is that the 65FX has four woofers and the 62FX only one. And both have James Loudspeaker's proprietary Adjustable Frequency Distribution Circuit, a single-knob equalization adjustment designed to compensate for the acoustics of your room by cutting lower midrange response and, to a lesser extent, treble response. AFDC is capable of extreme effects-maximum cut on the midrange is 18 decibels, where on other in-walls the EQ adjustment maxes out at plus or minus 3 dB. Just a little AFDC goes a long way for me. I find that a slight turn of the control makes the FX series speakers sound pleasantly smoother in a highly reverberant room, but more than about a quarter turn alters the sound too much for my taste.

Both of the speakers employ a super-simple mounting mechanism: a long strip of aluminum secured to the speaker's frame with long screws. The aluminum strip slips inside the wall; when your installer cinches down on the screws, the wall is clamped tightly to the speaker's stiff 5052 aircraft aluminum frame. This mounting method subjects much more of the wall surface to clamping than does the usual assortment of small "dog-leg" clamps found on most in-walls, so it, too, helps minimize vibration of the wall.
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