I bet they'd be lauded as the best bargain at the show even at roughly four times their price. I found myself wondering how these speakers would fare if you dressed them up in some fancy veneer, brought them to Rocky Mountain Audio Fest, and offered them at $1,000 per pair. Pete Levin's piano stretched from speaker to speaker, giving me the feeling I could hear the individual parts of the instrument from one end to the other, contributing their own little bits to the sound. I really got the feel of the drumsticks on the snare head and the cymbals, and the occasional accents from chimes and shakers were as perfectly and precisely imaged between the speakers as they could be. Best of all was the imaging on the percussion. I had to play "Matte Kudasai" from the LP Levin Brothers three times to catch all the good stuff going on.
With one caveat I'll discuss below, the T50 seems quite up to the task of slam-bang home theater sound. More important, though, I loved the natural sound and clarity of the dialogue. I watched Fury, the Brad Pitt WWII tank movie, in part because I thought the numerous explosions of the tanks' 75mm rounds would tax the T50's sole 6.5-inch woofer, but no.the speakers weathered the punishment just fine, even with the volume cranked to +3 dB on my Denon receiver. With the T50s in my system, it was easy to enjoy the movies and not think about the sound. With movies, I open a beer, pop some popcorn, sit back, and barely move for at least 90 minutes. There's a good reason why movies are more relaxing for me: with music I listen a lot deeper, start wanting to dig into the pile of LPs I've found at swap meets and used record stores, and maybe even go grab my bass and start lifting lines and licks.
In the case of the Polk T50, I did it just the opposite because I spent the fall doing a lot of traveling-and when I've been on the road for a while, nothing feels so relaxing as sitting down to watch a movie using my Samsung projector (one of the old Joe Kane models) and a good audio system. I usually start my tower-speaker tests with music, then move to movies toward the end of my testing. The T50 comes fully assembled and doesn't include or accommodate floor spikes, so I just plopped them down, toed them in to point at my listening chair, plucked off the grilles, and got to listening. There's not much to do in terms of setup. For level-matched comparisons with other speakers, I used my Audio by Van Alstine AVA ABX switcher.
I used the Polk Audio T50 towers mostly with my Denon AVR-2809CI AV receiver, but also with my usual reference system, which includes a Classé Audio CA-2300 amp and CP-800 preamp/DAC.
If you want to augment your T50s to build a full home theater system, Polk also offers the $99 T30 bookshelf speaker and the $129 T30 center speaker. That's about what I hoped for in a speaker like this.
I confirmed this by popping off the back panel and finding a crossover with two capacitors, two chokes, and two resistors a trace of the circuit plus my later measurements suggest that the electrical roll-off is second-order (12 dB/octave) on both the woofer and tweeter. Michael Greco, Polk's global brand director, stressed to me that the company hadn't "cheaped out" by stripping the crossover down to just a couple of components, something I've complained about in lots of reviews of budget speakers. The enclosure is made from relatively thin MDF (it yields a resonant clunk when rapped with a knuckle), but it seems fairly well braced inside. On the back, there's just one set of five-way binding posts.
Drivers include a one-inch silk dome tweeter, a 6.5-inch composite (i.e., paper) cone woofer, and two 6.5-inch passive radiators that from the front look identical to the woofer.
The 36.25-inch-high enclosure is wrapped in vinyl with a simulated black ash finish-just like almost every other budget speaker ever made. There's nothing fancy about the T50, but neither is there anything obviously lacking. Finally, though, at least one of the big names is trying to get in on the trend: Polk just introduced the T50, a tower speaker that costs just $129 each, or $258 per pair. I'm surprised, though, at how long it has taken other mainstream speaker manufacturers to come up with a response, especially since Jones left Pioneer early this year for Elac and has already come up with a whole new budget speaker line for that company. Andrew Jones really started something when he did his line of ultra-inexpensive yet shockingly good speakers for Pioneer.