Ok, I had a few more beers than usual tonight so excuse any typos, but I feel the need to get my growing hatred towards polk off my chest!
I have been doing a ton of listening, talking, researching about speakers, and polk, with no disrespect intended, just pisses me off!
A few too many people now have told me how good polk is for my "price range", like to the point where they seemed like programmed robots or cyborgs or something. I just didn't get it. But I finally figured it out. I call it:
Psychospecmatics.
What I think is going on, is that polk realized that the #1 thing most people look at as far as specs, even people who know nothing about speakers or how they work, is the: frequency response or frequency range. So, they're doing the same thing as Bose, except, they sort of went the opposite way of Bose, who don't even publish their specs, and instead bult their speakers cheaply in a way that makes them look good in the one spec which EVERYONE looks at: Frequency response. Even if it means creating a total piece of crap. I mean, Oh wow, extra Khz that I and humans can't even hear mixed in with a total distorted twangfest.
Now, these people who look at this one spec, think to themselves "wow, this speaker must be good if it goes up to 27khz", and when they listen to it, their subconscious tells them that their headaches are actually pleasure, and the twang from the unbalanced frequency response is actually all those extra sounds in the high frequences that they don't usualy hear on other speakers, and that the distortion is just extra high end godlyness.
I was in the market for what would be considered here as value speakers recently so I listened to alot of different speakers, consequently, I developed POLK RADAR.
I can honeslty hear if any polk speaker is playing and tell if it is polk, even in a room full of noise and other speakers playing. How? Because I start to get a headache and the erge to smash the living hell out of something!
I was at a store the other day looking at subs, and unfortunately for me I walked by a polk HT set up blasting some movie. All I heard was distortion and twang. INfacnt, I think Polk should change their name to: TWANGY DISTORTION!!!
I'm reluctant to call these polk devices "speakers" because by definition they're more like torture devices. I bet Hitler could have built death camps utilizing blasting polk speakers.
They wouldn't even have had to kill anybody because any group of people in their right minds who are forced so listen to those pieces of crap would probably have just killed themselves.
Next time I go to any store that sells speakers, I am going to call first and ask if they have any Polks blasting, because if they do, I am going to put the earplugs in before I even walk in the store, so I can go to the area the polks are playing, and turn them right off, thus, avoided the two day headache that is finally goin away now after all these beers.
"I can honeslty hear if any polk speaker is playing and tell if it is polk, even in a room full of noise and other speakers playing. How? Because I start to get a headache and the erge to smash the living hell out of something!"
You might want to talk these issues out with a professional, James. That's not healthy. It's just a speaker - albeit not a very good speaker on average. Save your frustration level for the food companies that are trying to slowly kill us with contents you can't pronouce and the banks that continue to get larger as their fees get higher.
I think the lsi series by polk isn't all that bad. I owned the lsi 9's and thought they did most things well. That being said, they were replaced by NHT 3's and it is a decision I do not regret.