Small soffit bezel... Still worth doing?

Hi guys Due to my narrow room my soffit bezel width can only be 40 inches. I am using 8 inch drivers in my monitors. The bezel on the verticle plane , up and down, will be a little more. Fro What I read ideally the bezel should measure, in theory, 40 inches from he middle of the driver in each direction!! Just not possible in my space. Using my smaller bezel, will I still get to hear the benefits of soffit mounting, or does it become not worth doing? I understand the smaller bezel will not work down to as lower frequency than a larger one. I guess the question is how much effect am I going to lose? Thanks a lot.

40 inches is fine! That's plenty for most speakers, (unless yours are really unusual, and go down to the very low end of the spectrum!). I have to laugh a bit when I see "soffits" with just an inch or two of wood around the speaker: so much effort for so little effect. But 40 inches wide on an 8 inch speaker is giving you about 16 inches on each side: That's decent. Well, OK, so it will be more like 12 inches on one side and 20 on the other, but that's still acceptable. I used to think that the speaker needed to be centered on the soffit panel, but that's actually not correct: the best place is to have it offset a bit, so that the acoustic center of the speaker is at about 2/5 of the width of the panel. So for a 40" panel you'd center it at about 16" from one edge.

Using my smaller bezel, will I still get to hear the benefits of soffit mounting, or does it become not worth doing?

It will be fine, and you'll get good benefits. Even if you only had 30 inches to work with, it would still be worthwhile. 20 inches would probably be borderline, but even then I'd go for it. Less than 20"? Hmmm... tough call. But 40" is plenty good! don't sweat it. What type of speakers are they? - Stuart -

Thanks Stuart, again :0). They are Quested H108s , passive and front ported. My only concern is the EQ required, but I'll worry about that after construction.