Monitor Audio has added three in-wall subwoofers to its Creator Series. The WS1-W10 System is 2,450 dollars, the WS2-W12 System is 2,950, and the flagship WS3-W12 System is 6,150. All three arrive in January 2027.
Monitor Audio's own list prices for the WS1-W10 System. The amplifier is 51 percent of the 2450 dollar total.
What makes them worth writing about is not the drivers. It is that Monitor Audio publishes the price of each piece of the entry system separately, and almost nobody does that. The 10-inch subwoofer is 800 dollars. The rear enclosure it sits in is 400. The IA500-S amplifier that drives it is 1,250. Add them up and you get 2,450, the exact price of the system.
So the subwoofer is a third of the price of the subwoofer.
Quick facts
- We list 275 subwoofers. 261 of them are powered, meaning the amplifier is inside and the price you see is the whole price.
- Of the 14 passive subwoofers we list, 10 are in-wall models. Going in the wall almost always means the amplifier comes out.
- Only 13 of the 270 subwoofers that publish a depth are under 150 mm deep. The median is 421.6 mm.
- At the same money, a subwoofer on the floor gives you a bigger driver, twice the power and 7.6 Hz more bass. The numbers are below.
- Monitor Audio publishes no frequency response, no depth and no output figure for any of the three. That gets its own section.
Why in-wall subwoofers are sold in pieces
A normal subwoofer is a sealed or ported box with a driver, an amplifier and a power socket. You put it on the floor, you plug it in, and you are done. That is 261 of the 275 subwoofers we hold.
An in-wall subwoofer cannot do that. There is no mains socket inside a stud cavity, and nowhere to put the heat an amplifier makes. So the driver goes in the wall and the amplifier goes in a rack somewhere else, wired to it like a passive speaker. Every in-wall subwoofer we list works this way, including the two SVS systems that we file as powered because SVS bundles the amplifier in the box price.
Monitor Audio's render of a Creator Series room. The subwoofer is the panel on the left wall.
That is the hidden cost, and it is not small. Here is what our 12 in-wall subwoofers actually cost, sorted by price.
Ten of those twelve are the driver and its frame only. You still need an amplifier. The two SVS systems include one, which is most of why they sit at the top of the table, and it is the fairest comparison to make with Monitor Audio's pricing.
The comparison nobody makes: same money, on the floor
Put the entry Monitor Audio system next to what 2,450 dollars buys as an ordinary subwoofer you can trip over. We list 12 powered subwoofers priced between 2,200 and 2,700 dollars, so the sample is real rather than one cherry-picked rival.
The average of those 12 is a 12.7 inch driver, 1,060 watts of built-in amplification and 18.8 Hz of low extension. The Monitor Audio system at 2,450 is a 10 inch driver on 500 watts. Our 12 in-wall subwoofers average 26.4 Hz.
The Monitor Audio WS1-W10 System against the 12 powered subwoofers we list priced 2200 to 2700 dollars
Individual examples make it starker. The GoldenEar SuperSub XXL is 2,499 dollars, has a 12 inch driver, 1,600 watts, and goes down to 10 Hz. The SVS SB16-Ultra is 2,300 dollars with a 16 inch driver and 1,500 watts. The SVS PB-4000 is 2,300 and reaches 16 Hz.
This is the honest reading. The bass you give up is not a limitation of putting a driver in a wall. It is a limitation of what is left of your budget after you have paid for the amplifier twice over, once in cash and once in cabinet volume. Buy on price and the floor wins every time. Buy because the room cannot have a box in it, and none of that matters.
How shallow is shallow, really
The reason people accept all this is depth, so it is worth putting a number on it. Of the 270 subwoofers we list that publish a depth, the median is 421.6 mm, which is about 16 and a half inches sticking into your room. Only 13 of the 270 are under 150 mm. Only five are under 100 mm.
Eleven of those 13 shallow ones are in-wall. The shallow end of the subwoofer market is not a design trend. It is one category, and it is small.
The other thing a wall install buys you is floor area, and that is genuinely large. Those 12 price-matched floor subwoofers average 500 mm deep and 460 mm wide. That is about a quarter of a square metre of floor, in the part of the room where a subwoofer actually wants to be.
We made a similar point about the Klipsch RP Compact subwoofers, which take half the floor space without giving up much bass. A wall install takes all of it. The trade is bigger in both directions.
The SVS 3000 In-Wall, one of the 12 in-wall subwoofers in our database, with the grille pulled back
What Monitor Audio has not published
Now the part that should slow you down, and it is a familiar one on this site.
Monitor Audio's own product pages for all three systems list the driver size, the amplifier power, the warranty and the price. They publish no frequency response, no mounting depth, no peak output figure and no impedance. For a subwoofer, frequency response is the specification. Its absence is the whole point of the product.
Press coverage of the launch does carry numbers. It reports 27 Hz to 250 Hz for the WS1-W10 in its box and 22 Hz without one, 25 Hz to 250 Hz for the WS2-W12, 23 Hz to 250 Hz for the WS3-W12, and mounting depths of 88 mm and 87 mm. Those figures are plausible and probably come from a dealer document. But we could not find them on anything Monitor Audio publishes, so we will not put them in a table as though they were confirmed.
There is a second, smaller disagreement. Monitor Audio calls the IA500-S a 500 watt amplifier and pairs it with both the Tier 1 and Tier 2 systems. Press coverage says it delivers 250 watts into the WS1-W10 and its full 500 into the WS2-W12. Both statements can be true at once, because the two subwoofers present different loads. It is still worth knowing that the entry system may not be getting 500 watts.
Our own gaps, since we are counting
Five of our 275 subwoofers have no published depth, so every depth figure here is out of 270. Two have no published low frequency. The Tannoy iW 62TS in the table above has no driver size and no dimensions at all, which is a row we should go back to.
And we do not hold the Monitor Audio Creator subwoofers yet. There is nothing to compare against and no review page to link, because they do not ship until January. When they do, they go in.
SVS 3000 In wall Single Subwoofer System Powered Subwoofer Speaker Key Specs
- 2 x 9" Woofer
- 22-250 Hz Frequency Response
- 800-watt RMS ( 2500-watt Peak) Integrated Amplifier
- 4ohms Nominal Impedance
- Dimensions (H x W x D): 25" x 12.01" x 3.73" / 635.0 x 305.1 x 94.7mm
- Read the Review
Questions answered
Do I need a separate amplifier for an in-wall subwoofer?
Almost always, yes. Of the 12 in-wall subwoofers we list, 10 are passive, meaning you buy an amplifier separately. Two are sold as complete systems with the amplifier included in the price. Monitor Audio's new Creator systems are the second kind, which is why 2,450 dollars buys less driver than the same money would buy on the floor.
Do in-wall subwoofers go as deep as normal ones?
As a category the gap is small. The 12 in-wall subwoofers we list average 26.4 Hz and the 259 powered subwoofers that publish a figure average 25.2 Hz. At the same price the gap is much wider, because an in-wall system spends a large part of the budget on the external amplifier. Compared with 12 floor subwoofers at 2,200 to 2,700 dollars, the difference is 26.4 Hz against 18.8 Hz.
How much room does an in-wall subwoofer actually save?
The 12 floor subwoofers we list in that price band average 500 mm deep, 460 mm wide and 531 mm tall. An in-wall model takes none of that floor. Of the 270 subwoofers we list with a published depth, only 13 are under 150 mm deep, and 11 of those 13 are in-wall.
When can I buy the Monitor Audio Creator subwoofers?
January 2027, according to Monitor Audio's own product pages. The WS1-W10 System is 2,450 dollars, the WS2-W12 System is 2,950 and the WS3-W12 System is 6,150. The WS1-W10 subwoofer, its rear box and the IA500-S amplifier are also sold individually at 800, 400 and 1,250 dollars.
Can I retrofit one into a finished wall?
The WS1-W10 is the only one of the three Monitor Audio describes as suitable for both new construction and retrofit, because it can be installed without its rear enclosure. The WS2-W12 and WS3-W12 are built around their enclosures and are meant to go in before the drywall does. That is the real constraint on this whole category, and it is a decision you make once.
So here is the question the table leaves open. If the same money buys a 12 inch driver and twice the power on the floor, is a subwoofer you cannot see worth giving that up, or would you rather find somewhere to put a box?