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So I've gone and bought some cheap bits to make Sonos  reach my bathroom at last! I have a speaker in every room including full cinema system, (playbar sub and play 1 surrounds)

The speaker is a monitor audio CT165-T2 60/65W I test wired it before I committed to mounting it in my ceiling and to be honest I was hoping for more bass, could this be because it's not in an enclosure/ ceiling and is not using the surrounding ceiling to reverberate the sound or have I wired it wrong or dreading maybe I've got a speaker that needs more power than the amp can put out.

ive basically wired it with 2x twin speaker wire and made sure positive to positive and negative to negative on the left and right channels correctly but wondering if there's a trick I'm missing?

If you have a sturdy cardboard box you could make a temporary (very poor) enclosure for the speaker and see if it helps.

Swapping the plus and minus leads on one channel and checking the bass levels would insure you aren’t seeing a mis-marked terminal.

I did swap the leads a few times but the original sounded the best, granted I didn't turn it up more than 25percent I could only just feel the woofer moving. It's brand new so I doubt a faulty speaker. I'll see about making an enclosure.

 

once I come to fit it, should I be looking at a fire hood? As my understanding was only if the room above was habitable but this is going in my top floor and so only my loft is above.

A speaker without an enclosure will put out very little bass. Think of a positive pressure (forward) wave on one side of the speaker cone and a negative (backward) pressure wave on the other side. If positive meets negative, the waves destroy each other. A speaker enclosure absorbs or constructively redirects the backward propagating wave.

Yes I understand the principal but this what I can assume a free air ceiling speaker as there was no enclosure specs for this speaker. Yes the ceiling will provide a resonant amount of sound but my loft is 10 times the size of my bathroom so I don't see how mounting it is going to make a huge difference to bass response.

 

What is good practise when installing ceiling speakers, fire hood would only provide fire protection and keep the insulation away from the speaker but there wasn't any mention of building an enclosure

A lot depends on the speaker, is it an open-air type or is it designed for an enclosure.

I can’t find the one you mentioned but the monitor audio C165-T2 shows a 20 Watt amp being good. It looks (but doesn’t clearly state) like it is self-enclosed so you shouldn’t need any enclosure, see the detailed install guide PDF there.

They do mention a Bass level switch, you might want to verify that is on High.

 

https://www.monitoraudio.com/en/product-ranges/core/c165-t2/

https://brand.monitoraudio.group/d/n8o5sDWgpzZK/document-library/show/eyJpZCI6MTc3MywidGltZXN0YW1wIjoiMTY2NzI2MzE4NSJ9:monitor-audio:san05xXPRVywh2tAp9mut4-ha8XcKR1po5av_35Drt8

In most respects a hole in the ceiling is a haphazard enclosure.

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