Big Sound
From Little Speakers

Stereo speakers should be heard but not seen.

That's what Deborah Crouch-White and a growing number of other homeowners believe, anyway. Mrs. Crouch-White is camouflaging the speaker in the dining room of her new house with a framed, Victorian-style still-life of a white peacock. To cover the speaker in her living room, she may use a lighthouse scene.

"When you have a formal dining room you don't want to have to look at the speaker," Mrs. Crouch-White says. "It takes away from the decor."

After spotting a picture in a magazine of a flat speaker mounted on a wall and covered with a framed print, Mrs. Crouch-White and her husband, Rick, drove three-and-a-half hours to the nearest dealer. "Before we purchased, we wanted to hear them," says Mrs. Crouch-White. "We were a little leery about what the sound quality would be."

Retailers say many homeowners have abandoned the stereo-speaker ethic that dominated the 1980s: "the bigger, the better." "It's absolutely the opposite now," says Jeff Hoover, president of Audio Advisors in West Palm Beach, Fla. "We hardly even sell large standing speakers anymore." Nowadays, he says, hidden-speaker products account for 75% of his company's sales, compared with 10% to 15% of sales five years ago.

Today, consumers have several choices when it comes to finding discreet ways to deliver stereo sound: flat speakers costing $199 to $499; in-wall or in-ceiling speakers that can range from $160 a pair to $5,000 apiece without installation; or speakers built within the wall, costing about a $1,000 a pair plus installation.

Last year, NCT Group Inc., Stamford, Conn., started selling its ArtGekko flat speaker; only 2 inches thick, the wall-mounted speaker is covered by a framed print made out of a porous silk. Depending on the size of the print, the ArtGekko speakers sell for $299 and up.

Mrs. Crouch-White and her husband considered the in-wall option but didn't like the look of a speaker grille that was flush with the wall -- it reminded them of a speaker on the inside of a car door. Instead they paid $899 for a pair of 18-by-24-inch ArtGekko speakers and chose from a catalog of hundreds of images for the wall hangings, ranging from Impressionist pieces to antique movie posters.

Last summer, Steve Galipeau needed speakers for his vacation house in Whidbey Island, Wash. To conserve floor space, he was looking for speakers that he could hang on the wall. At his main house in Redmond, Wash., Mr. Galipeau has a set of 6-foot-tall, 60-pound speakers, but he says the "older generation speakers" are too big for his vacation home. He settled on a pair of 11-by-14-inch wall-mounted speakers that are only a couple of inches thick.

"Hardly anybody notices them," Mr. Galipeau says of his new speakers, which cost $299 each. "I'm going to do the same thing with my TV."

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