Electro-Voice EVID C8.2
A ceiling speaker with its own ported steel enclosure and a coax driver. Most installers never see it again once the tile drops back in. It weighs eleven pounds.
Overview
Electro-Voice's own documentation describes the EVID C8.2 as a complete two-way ceiling loudspeaker package. It ships as one unit: a baffle/bezel assembly, a perforated grille, a rear enclosure, an 8-inch coaxial driver, and an internal line-matching transformer. Nothing else is required. Anyone who has spent an afternoon hunting for a missing back can or a tile bridge that didn't come in the box will see the appeal.
The driver is an 8-inch polypropylene cone with a waveguide-coupled 1-inch titanium-coated dome tweeter mounted coaxially. The crossover is a second-order network at 2.6 kHz. Electro-Voice built in what it calls full-bandwidth overload protection, a circuit that guards the network, woofer, and tweeter against excessive input. The rear enclosure is zinc-plated heavy-gauge steel with fiberglass damping material inside, ported for extended bass response. The baffle and bezel are molded from heat-resistant UL-approved ABS. The grille is perforated steel in semi-gloss white powdercoat.
The rear enclosure does more work than it looks like. In a drop-ceiling install, the space above the tile is a plenum. It is often shared with return air, sometimes shared with the building's structural guts, and it is acoustically unpredictable. The C8.2 has its own damped, ported steel back can, so the plenum is taken out of the equation. The low-frequency behavior is set by the enclosure, not by whatever happens to be sitting twelve inches above it.
The transformer is the other piece of real engineering. The C8.2 runs on 8 ohms, 70-volt, or 100-volt distributed lines, with taps at 1.88, 3.75, 7.5, 15, and 30 watts. A switch on the front baffle selects the tap, so the installer can set it without pulling the can back out of the ceiling. The 1.88-watt tap is available for a 70-volt system, and the higher taps serve both 70- and 100-volt lines. The 8-ohm bypass is there for anyone running the speaker on a conventional amplifier.
Specs, as published in the technical documentation: frequency response of 70 Hz to 18 kHz at -10 dB, 110-degree conical coverage, 100 watts continuous with 400 watts peak power handling, 89 dB sensitivity at 1 watt/1 meter, and a maximum calculated SPL of 115 dB. Nominal impedance is 8 ohms, with a minimum of 6.0 ohms. The AES power rating is 100 watts of band-limited pink noise from 70 Hz to 18 kHz at a 6 dB crest factor, which is the same figure stated the way the standards people like it. The unit measures 10.0 inches in diameter and 10.6 inches deep, with a 10.8-inch cutout, and weighs 11.0 pounds each. A pair ships at 24.0 pounds.
The package includes a tile bridge, a backing plate support, and a cutout template. The tile bridge lets the C8.2 hang safely in a drop ceiling built from mineral wool or other fiber-based tiles. It spreads the load across the grid instead of putting it on a single tile. The rear cover has provisions for a junction box fitting. The connection is a four-pin Phoenix-style removable terminal block that accepts 12-gauge wire and provides loop-through to additional speakers. The whole assembly carries a UL 2043 rating, the one that applies to air-handling spaces, so the C8.2 is rated for use in plenums.
Electro-Voice lists the C8.2's part number as 301261-000. The documentation also names a set of performance-matched amplifiers: the CPS-1, CPS-2, and CPS-2T, plus the MA-1206 and MA-1212 mixer amplifiers. They aren't requirements, but they're the combinations Electro-Voice tested and stood behind.
Two variants sit alongside the standard C8.2. The C8.2LP is a low-profile version built for tight ceiling voids. It has the same 8-inch coax and transformer architecture but is shallower, and the documentation describes it as delivering rich sound in tight spaces. The C8.2HC is a pattern-control version with a 75-degree conical coverage pattern above 1 kHz, aimed at high-ceiling rooms where intelligibility at distance is the problem. The standard C8.2's 110-degree conical pattern is the wide-dispersion choice for normal ceiling heights.
The EVID line also includes the C4.2, a smaller 4-inch version with a 130-degree pattern; the C10.1, a 10-inch ceiling subwoofer with a 150-watt rating and a 45-180 Hz range for adding low end to a ceiling system; and the C12.2, a 12-inch coaxial with 100 dB sensitivity for larger rooms. The C8.2 sits in the middle of that family. It is bigger and more sensitive than the C4.2, and it is the practical default for most commercial installs that need music and voice in the same room.
The trade press covered the EVID line at the time. Pro-Audio-Review (September 2006, p.68) listed the C8.2's architectural-acoustics competitors in its installation-speaker buyer's guide, placing it alongside the Community Cloud 6 and the OAP AS-122. That gives a snapshot of what an installer would have been comparing it against. The ported steel back can, the coax driver with a waveguide tweeter, and the front-panel tap selector put it in a different class from the open-back in-wall and ceiling speakers that dominated the budget end of that market.
The C8.2 is not a hi-fi speaker. It's a tool for distributed audio in retail, restaurants, offices, houses of worship, and conference rooms, and it's designed to be installed once and forgotten. The front-baffle tap switch, the loop-through terminal block, the included tile bridge, and the UL 2043 rating all make the installer's life easier and the system more reliable. The 70 Hz low end won't shake a room, but it's honest bass for an 8-inch driver in a ported can. The 89 dB sensitivity means it doesn't need a monster amplifier to reach useful levels.
For a collector, the EVID C8.2 is an odd duck. It doesn't show up in listening rooms, and audiophile circles don't talk about it. It is a well-executed piece of commercial audio engineering, with every design decision aimed at one specific problem. Pull one out of a ceiling and it still works. The steel back can doesn't rot, the ABS baffle doesn't warp, and the transformer either passes signal or it doesn't.
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