Why Cedar instead of Cane for a design studio?

Cedar is rated 100W RMS with 96dB sensitivity — both higher than Cane's 50W/92dB — which suits a brief calling for genuine party-level output rather than background or ambient listening. A studio meant to host, not just furnish, needs the extra headroom.

Why pair Cedar with the Juniper subwoofer instead of an Acacia model?

Juniper is a larger, higher-output subwoofer (350W RMS, extending to 25Hz) than the Acacia range, matched to Cedar's higher-output brief — the same logic that pairs a bigger speaker with a bigger sub runs through the amplifier and subwoofer choice too.

Why mount the speakers beside an arched niche instead of inside it?

Placing the speakers discreetly on both sides of the niche keeps the niche itself — the room's architectural focal point — uninterrupted, while still giving a symmetrical stereo pair centred on the space people actually gather in.

What does "party level" actually mean in output terms?

It means the system is specified with headroom for sustained, louder listening — not a single peak — which is why this brief moved to Cedar and Juniper rather than the Cane-and-Acacia combination used in XSCACE's more ambient-focused case studies.

Does a design studio need a different placement approach than a living room?

The underlying principle — symmetrical placement that preserves the room's focal point — is the same as most XSCACE case studies. What changes here is the product tier, driven by a louder, more social use case than typical ambient background listening.

Does a 25×15ft studio need more than one pair of Cedar?

No. Cedar is specified for rooms up to roughly 30×40ft, so a 25×15ft studio sits comfortably inside a single pair's coverage with headroom left over — which is why it was chosen over adding a second pair of a smaller model. Rooms beyond about 30ft in the longest dimension are where a second pair or a distributed layout starts to earn its cost.

Case Study: Design Studio Sound System, Party-Level Audio

Most XSCACE case studies are specified for ambient or background listening. This 25×15ft design studio, built around a plaster archway and a curated furniture collection, had a different brief entirely: party-level, immersive audio — loud enough to entertain, without touching the room's careful visual balance.

The System

A pair of XSCACE Cedar speakers, discreetly wall-mounted on both sides of the arched niche
One XSCACE Juniper subwoofer
One XSCACE Air Amp

A Different Tier for a Different Brief

XSCACE Cedar slim array speaker installed in a studio interior

Cedar is rated 100W RMS at 96dB sensitivity — meaningfully more headroom and efficiency than Cane's 50W/92dB — and it's paired here with Juniper, a 350W subwoofer extending to 25Hz rather than the 200W, 35Hz-rated Acacia models used in most of XSCACE's ambient-listening case studies. The upgrade isn't arbitrary: "parties as well as ambient music" is explicitly a louder, more sustained brief than background listening, and specifying for that ceiling from the start avoids a system straining at the one moment it actually needs to perform.

Case Study at a Glance

XSCACE Juniper 12-inch powered subwoofer

Room: Design studio, 25×15ft
Use case: Party-level, immersive audio
System: 2× XSCACE Cedar, Juniper subwoofer, Air Amp
Placement: Discreetly wall-mounted on both sides of the arched niche
Goal: A seamless auditory experience that blends technology into design without overt presence

See the full spec sheet for XSCACE Cedar, or read the lounge case study for another entertaining-focused brief.

Planned, controlled and calibrated

Every XSCACE installation follows the same three stages: planned in the simulator, controlled from the app that matches the hardware, and calibrated with measurement. A living room has one or two seats that matter and a great many surfaces that do not cooperate.

Planned

XSCACE Floorplan Sound Simulation takes a plan from trace to bill of quantities in the browser. For a room like this the outputs that matter are:

Coverage at the seating position rather than the room centre

First-reflection points flagged, which decides placement more often than taste does

Room modes located, so uneven bass is designed out rather than equalised later

XSCACE Floorplan Sound Simulation showing first reflections on a traced room plan

Trace, place, predict — before anything is ordered

Controlled

Day-to-day control is XSCACE Controller on iOS and Android. It handles volume, EQ and grouping, and the streaming amplifiers also appear natively as AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect targets, so the app is for control rather than for getting audio into the room.

Calibrated

The calibration toolkit inside XSCACE Studio measures what the room actually does — eleven instruments covering SPL, delay, levels, polarity, frequency response, THD, sub alignment, transfer function, RT60, RTA and export, free on macOS. Here the ones that earn their place are:

Delay and polarity from a single sweep per channel

Sub Align, which integrates the subwoofer then re-measures to prove the correction

Frequency response at the listening position, not at the speaker

XSCACE Studio calibration toolkit — Sub Align

Cedar runs down to 100Hz against Juniper's 25Hz, and the two records recommend different crossover points (100Hz and 200Hz). Which suits the room is a measurement, not a preference.