Ahh summer time. Time for pools, get togethers with friends and tearing apart walls in search of audio and aesthetic excellence for your flat screen TV. While this may not be the average summer activity for most I’ll wager more than a few Secrets readers are in the midst of their own audio-video inspired renovations. Here’s my story of an in wall audio adventure courtesy of the new Paradigm Millenia 20 Hybrids.

Paradigm is no stranger to in wall speakers - with four separate in wall speakers lines in their regular line-up and three more in their reference series you could say they have this niche covered. That being said, adding one more product to their in wall arsenal shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows.

But what if you took a successful wall-mountable speaker from their reference series and did a redesign to try and better meet a few important criteria. The speaker must still sound great – but it must also better complement a wall mounted flat screen TV. What’s a speaker engineer to do? Wall mountable speakers are great products but with flat screens slimming down each year and low profile mounts becoming common having your speakers stick out a half foot past your TV starts impairing that clean aesthetic you were trying so hard for. In walls seem like a good answer but they can be troublesome to install in pre-existing construction and/or compromise on sonic performance. How to take advantage of both? Why not create a hybrid to capture the best of both worlds.