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Published April 1, 2001

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Polk Audio RT3000p Loudspeakers

One of the biggest differences between the hi-fi market here in the US and in the UK is that, in the UK, the entire market for affordable loudspeakers is dominated by homegrown companies -- and they are respected for it! You look at B&W, Celestion or KEF and they all produce solidly engineered $250/pr loudspeakers with impeccable specs. And if you visit their factories, as I have, you can't help but be struck by how production is streamlined to make even those modestly-priced offerings profitable.

The market over here is different. Most cheap speakers are imports -- a lot of them are the entry-level British offerings -- and we don't really have any speaker companies that are similar to the British behemoths, companies that are outgrowths of the efforts of home-grown enthusiast-founders -- except for Polk.

When I was in college (Which time? All of them, smart aleck!) Polks were the obvious choice for an audiophile on a budget, but you can scour the magazines from cover to cover these days and barely find a mention of the multi-million dollar per year loudspeaker manufacturer. What happened?

Success, for one thing. And that led to a number of marketing decisions that grew the company, possibly at the cost of its original tight focus. Polk's line got so large and so ungainly that even serious students of the art couldn't tell which were the good-sounding loudspeakers and which were just the me-too products.

And that, in my opinion, was the other problem, there were me-too products. These days, there seems to be a new attitude at Polk -- a back-to-the-roots return to audio excellence, and the return of Matthew Polk sans lab coat to the ad pages, but looking jazzed at the possibilities of low-cost high-performance audio.

I first experienced this when I reviewed the $250 RT5 for Stereophile a few years back, and I liked what I learned about the speaker and the company, so when Paul DiComo called me and offered to "surprise" me with a loudspeaker, I eagerly invited him up for a visit.

An art of balance…

He arrived with a modest-sized box and a pair of medium-large speaker cabinets in the back of his hatchback. Upon further examination, the "speakers" proved to be powered subwoofers that also served as speaker stands for the RT3000p mid/high speaker cabinets. The whole four-cabinet system sells for $3599.90 -- not cheap, but definitely real world.

And, speaking of the real world, the cabinets are good-looking and covered in wood veneer -- black oak in the case of my samples, but also available in rosewood. The woofer cabinet is only 10" wide and 18" deep, so it presents a relatively slim profile to the room.

The sub cabinet is mounted on a plinth, which the cabinet floats above on four rods. In the gap between plinth and cabinet, you can see a cone that seems to fit inside the down-firing port like a mute fits into a brass instrument's bell. It does, actually -- it’s called a "Power Port" and it eliminates port chuffing by promoting laminar flow instead of turbulence. The plinth is equipped with threaded carpet spikes at the four corners and is notched to provide easy access to them for adjustment.

Each subwoofer contains a 300W amplifier, a speaker-level crossover, a direct line input, an adjustable low-pass filter, an LFE input (for video installations) and two front-firing 8" woofers. The built-in 300W amplifiers accept either line-level inputs (which is what I used) or speaker-level. A 3dB gain switch allows you to compensate for low-level inputs.

The subs' crossovers are electronic fourth order Butterworth designs, continuously variable between 60-100Hz (80Hz is recommended). Each has a front-baffle -- mounted level control (thoughtful!), a phase switch and a high-pass filtered (80Hz) output. This level of flexibility allows you to pretty well compensate for a realm of room and speaker-related flaws.

The subwoofers' drivers are 8" polymer/graphite cones with tapered cross-sections. The voice coils are four-layer windings on a 2" aluminum former, with a lip designed to keep the windings from slipping off if the driver exceeds maximum excursion limits. The pole piece is vented, which aids cooling for maximum power handling.

The mid/high enclosure rests upon the sub on a trio of sorbothane discs. It employs two 6.5" midrange drivers and a 1" dome tweeter. The midrange drivers use a cascade tapered crossover -- the bottom driver rolls off at 12dB/octave above 1.2kHz, while the upper one "meets" the tweeter at 2kHz. This is said to prevent the comb-filter effect common to other similar dual-midrange driver designs. Both drivers are electrically high-pass filtered at 80Hz (12dB/octave).

Polk utilizes a technology they call "Dynamic Balance" to examine all their drivers via laser interferometry which allows them to design their drivers to eliminate unwanted resonances from their drivers. They also utilize ports tuned to the resonance of the speaker cabinets -- a principle they call "destructive interference" -- to null box resonance. They claim that the port radiation is 180 degrees out of phase with the box's internal depth resonance and should therefore cancel. I'm not entirely convinced -- it seems to me that some box signature remains, but perhaps it has been reduced.

The front baffles of both subwoofer and mid/high speaker are constructed of 1" MDF -- all other walls are .75". The front baffles are faced in a felt-like material called Velvin®, a material said to damp panel resonances.

All in all, the RT3000p seems well-thought-out and well-constructed. Fit'n'finish are good, if not sumptuous, and the speaker won't embarrass itself -- or anyone else -- no matter how fancy the room in which it's placed.

And, if the ease with which I got 'em set up and running in my room is any indication, they're a snap to set up, too. Less than two hours of moving them around and setting crossover, phase and toe-in were required to get 'em 98% of the way there. Then, just a few further adjustments over the course of the audition, principally wire and equipment changes, honed the sound to a fare-thee-well.

Balanced in the delight of our thought…

Having set the RT3000ps up so quickly, Paul and I moved on to one of those have you heard this one? sessions that characterize the best audiophile listening marathons, but rarely result from the tension-laden atmosphere of a manufacturer visit. Paul had come loaded for bear, CD-wise -- my favorite was his copy of the soundtrack to Pedro Almodovar's All About My Mother, which I haven't been able to locate anywhere. It was wonderfully layered and open sounding -- modern tango with an edge, sort of Piazzolla-lite -- with a wry sixties sensibility. It's wonderful stuff. Snap it up, if you can -- and then tell me where you got it.

My original set-up had me driving the Polks with my Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 300, but as I listened over the ensuing weeks, I came to feel the amp was not the ideal match for the speakers. There was an etched, slightly spitchy quality to the top end that just sounded too much like hi-fi. I switched the Nu-Vista for the tiny Monarchy Audio SM-70s in balanced monoblock configuration and the tweeter settled down. The sound was balanced and detailed; liquid but not truncated.

Later I substituted the lovely AES AE25, which I liked even better -- your mileage will vary based on your love of or aversion to tubes. But whatever you choose, you won't need much power to drive the RT3000p's "satellites" -- just a dab'll do ya.

I also found that the woofers benefited from some cable swapping. I had started out with DiMarzio M-Path, but later substituted Kimber KCAG, which tightened up the bass.

The overall character of the loudspeaker is remarkably like that of the Thiel 7.2 -- it is open and detailed and airy, with no hint of heaviness. But feed it a really low note and it'll reproduce it with authority.

That's not to say the $3600 Polk is a CS7.2-killer -- I'm still really high on the Thiels -- but the Polk sound is remarkably Thiel-like and remarkably easy to listen to. I trotted out my well-played copy of Rendezvous by the Jerome Harris Quintet (STPH013-2) and all the old familiar attributes were in place. Marty Erhlich's alto sax skittered all over the landscape, graceful as a bird; Art Baron's growling trombone buzzed and clattered like an old drunk's phlegmy rasp (and that's a good thing); while Steve Nelson's vibes sparked off harmonics like a flint striking cold steel; and over it all, Billy Drummond's tuneful drum and cymbal craft played little playful tunes that pulled it all together. Harris's bass sounded lithe and lean -- too lithe and lean for my taste, but that's not the fault of the Polks. That's the way we mixed it and I haven't heard it for years without wishing we'd pumped him up in the mix. Score one for the Polk's essential truth and tonal honesty.

I also gave 'em a good workout with the Rautavaara disc I review this month in Hot Music [Ondine ODE 910-2 CD]. The Finnish basses laid down a foundation you could build a cathedral on -- the Polks rendered them as massive and warm, quite rightly. The speakers also captured the delicacy and air of the recording, while reproducing the sopranos and altos with a gentle precision that gave me goosebumps. Who'd a thunk it? The RT3000p is a great vocals speaker.

The RT3000p did always have a slightly relentless honesty, no matter which amp I paired them with. This manifested itself as a slight over-sibilance, especially in the woman's vocal region, but once I started using the lower-powered amps, it was minimized.

Actually, the RT3000p's a great speaker, period. I spend a few hours every day auditioning the review samples I'm sent by record companies. The Polks adapted themselves to all the different types of music I need to listen to -- they never imposed a "Polk sound" on the music, rather they changed with each disc, just as they ought to.

So when I got an advance copy of Redd Volkaert's No Stranger to a Tele [High Tone HCD 8129], I couldn't wait to listen to it. I've become a total telecaster freak late in life and I just had to hear what this disc sounded like. It's tele all the way, from honky-tonk squawk to pure barnyard chicken-pickin'. Being no stranger to a tele myself, I can definitively state, now that's what Leo Fender's older guitar really sounds like.

And I could say that about almost anything I've heard in the last few months. The Polks are tonal chameleons of the first water.

They aren't perfect -- no speaker is. They don't open up a room the way the Thiel CS7.2 does. Their sound remains focused between the two speakers and goes only back to the front wall of the listening room. This doesn't mean that they don't soundstage -- they do, it just stays within those boundaries.

And that probably indicates that they aren't champs at resolving low-level information. Something's blurring the details, even if ever so slightly. My guess is that we're talking mild cabinet resonance here.

That will bother some folks, I expect -- but I know some listeners who are disconcerted by too big a soundstage within their rooms. I guess you'll have to chacun yer own goût. Since the details were all there, it didn't bother me.

I balanced all, brought all to mind…

In fact, nothing much about the Polks bothered me, once I took a 300W amplifier off 'em and put a smaller one in its place. This is good news to the average consumer -- they should work well with relatively low-wattage integrateds and receivers, since all the oomph is supplied by their own 300W subwoofer amps.

They're well-built and well-engineered. My complaints were relatively minor and may strike some listeners as overly picky. The Polks aren't hard to place in a room. And they certainly aren't hard to find -- Polk must have thousands of dealers. And, at $3600/pair, they seem reasonably priced for all you're getting. Not quite a steal, but a damned honest price -- one a smaller company couldn't possibly match. Anyone looking for new speaker ought to start here first. You might just discover you need look no further.

...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com

Polk RT3000p Loudspeakers
Price: $3599.90 USD per pair
Warranty: Five years parts and labor

Polk Audio
5601 Metro Drive
Baltimore, MD 21215
Phone: (410) 358-3600

Website: www.polkaudio.com

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