PSB VisionSound VS300 Aluminum On-Wall Speaker

PSB VisionSound VS300 — An On-Wall Speaker Actually Designed as One, in Extruded Canadian Aluminum

A PSB VisionSound VS300 in black, built in Canada, and one of the very few on-wall speakers that was engineered as an on-wall rather than adapted into one.

The Front Port

The difference is visible from the front, and it is the port. The VS300 shares its tweeter, its terminals, its crossover and its grille with the VS400 floorstander that sat above it in the same line — but the VS400 vents out the back, and a speaker that vents out the back cannot be pushed flat against a wall without the wall itself changing how it sounds. PSB moved the VS300’s port to the front. That single decision is what separates a speaker designed to hang on a wall from a bookshelf speaker with a bracket screwed to it, and almost nothing else in the category made it.

On-Wall Correction

The second decision is a switch on the back, and it is the reason these measure flat where they are actually used. Mounting any speaker hard against a wall creates a dip in its response centred around 400 to 500 Hz, where the sound reflecting off the wall behind arrives late and cancels part of what came forward. PSB’s David Smith found it during the VS300’s development and built a corrective circuit into the crossover to fill it in. The switch selects NORMAL for free-standing use or ON-WALL for wall mounting, so the speaker is flat in either position rather than compromised in one of them. On the used market this is the feature people go looking for and rarely find.

The Bracket

The mounting bracket is the third, and it is the one you will appreciate every time you change the room. It fixes to the cabinet and rotates through a wide arc, locked by a knob at one end that tightens and loosens by hand — so a speaker already hung on the wall can be aimed inward toward the seat, or tilted up or down, with no tools and nothing taken down. The same bracket lets the speaker lie horizontally on a shelf, a console or above a display and be angled at the listener from there, which makes it a genuine centre-channel option as well as a wall speaker.

The Aluminum Cabinet

The cabinet is extruded aluminum — a vented metal enclosure rather than moulded plastic or thin MDF — and the difference is obvious the moment you pick one up. A metal extrusion of this section is far stiffer for its wall thickness than anything that could be moulded, which keeps cabinet resonance out of a design whose whole purpose is to be slim, and it is why these still feel like precision hardware two decades on when their plastic contemporaries feel like accessories. In black the anodised finish reads as equipment rather than decor, and it disappears against a dark wall or a display bezel.

The Driver Array

Behind the grille is a two-way, three-driver array: a pair of 4.5 inch polypropylene woofers on butyl rubber surrounds flanking a one inch aluminum dome, crossed over at 2.5 kHz. Two small woofers rather than one larger one buys low-frequency output while keeping the baffle narrow, and it keeps the vertical dispersion tidy, which is what you want from a speaker sitting at ear height on a wall. Response runs to 68 Hz on axis with output to 52 Hz, so a subwoofer belongs in the system, as it does with any speaker this size.

Connections

Connection is by five-way gold-plated binding posts, which is not a given at this size — plenty of on-walls of the era shipped with spring clips, and a spring clip limits you to bare wire for the life of the speaker. Five-way posts take banana plugs, spades or bare wire, so these accept a properly terminated cable and a mechanical connection that will not work loose behind a speaker you would rather not take down again.

What to Drive Them With

One honest note on partnering equipment: at 86 dB sensitivity and six ohms nominal, dipping to four, these are not a lifestyle speaker for a lifestyle amplifier. They want a receiver or amplifier with real current delivery, and PSB rated them for 25 to 100 watts. Given proper power they repay it — the aluminum cabinet and the metal dome are both there to be transparent, and they will show you what the amplifier upstream is doing.

Radique’s Take

The cabinets are stamped made in Canada, which on a wall-mounted speaker is worth more than provenance for its own sake. PSB has built its reputation on measured, repeatable engineering rather than styling, and the VS300 is that approach pointed at a format the rest of the industry was treating as a furniture problem. A front port, a corrective crossover, an aluminum extrusion and real binding posts are what it looks like when a speaker company builds an on-wall instead of an accessory. It sold for $749 USD each when new.

Testing

This unit has been thoroughly inspected and tested to confirm full functionality.

Condition

Cosmetically the speakers are either graded Excellent or Very Good.

The speakers that are in excellent condition, the cabinet and grille are unmarked.

The speakers that are in very good condition, the cabinet is unmarked. The grille cloth carries a single small hole, roughly the size of a Tic Tac, at the extreme edge of the frame — it is the only thing separating this unit from the Excellent-graded ones, and with the grille in place at normal viewing distance the two are difficult to tell apart. The grille is removable, and on a wall or surround position it sits well away from the eye.

Speaker Cable to Suit

Because these terminate in five-way binding posts, they are a straightforward match for our Custom Speaker Cable Builder, built to order in any length you specify and terminated to suit. Banana plugs are the natural choice on a wall-mounted speaker — a banana seats positively in a five-way post and can be disconnected and reseated without retermination, which matters on something hung out of easy reach. Spades are available if you prefer a captive connection, and long runs are no trouble, which on a wall installation is usually what you want.

A Canadian-built on-wall speaker in a metal cabinet, front-ported so it can actually go against a wall, with wall-bounce correction in the crossover and a bracket you can aim by hand. Available for pickup in Kanata, or shipped across Canada and internationally — we have sent equipment to fifteen countries in the past year, each piece packed in-house in 275 lb test double-wall boxes. Live shipping rates for your address are calculated at checkout. Backed by Radique Audio’s Bumper-to-Bumper Warranty and our Perpetual Trade-Back Program. Available for audition by appointment in Kanata.

PSB VisionSound VS300 Specifications

• Type: Two-way, three-driver on-wall loudspeaker, vented extruded aluminum enclosure, front-ported
• Drive units: One 1 inch aluminum-dome tweeter, two 4.5 inch polypropylene-cone woofers with butyl rubber surrounds
• Crossover frequency: 2.5 kHz
• On-wall correction: Switch-selectable NORMAL / ON-WALL crossover compensation
• Frequency range: 68 Hz – 23,000 Hz on axis; low-frequency cutoff 52 Hz at -10 dB
• Sensitivity: 86 dB at 2.83 V
• Nominal impedance: 6 ohms, minimum 4 ohms
• Recommended amplifier power: 25 – 100 watts
• Connections: Five-way gold-plated binding posts
• Mounting: Adjustable rotating wall bracket included, hand-tightened, no tools required
• Finish: Black
• Country of manufacture: Canada
• Original retail: $749 USD each
• Dimensions: (Width x Height x Depth) 6.3 x 26.0 x 5.3 inches (161 x 660 x 135 mm), with bracket fitted
• Weight: 14 lbs (6.4 kg) each, with wall bracket fitted

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