thedelihaus
Nocturnal transmissions
An exerpt from TNT Audio's interview with Matthew Polk-
"....The early 70's was an interesting time for our industry. Especially in the UK there were some great sounding, very sophisticated speakers being produced like the Spendors and original Quad ESL's...These systems had great mid and vocal performance but were also pretty difficult for us Americans to live with. They wouldn't handle any power, had crappy bass and blew up if you looked at them sideways. In the US we had a whole bunch of basically terrible sounding loudspeakers...But, true to what the US market wanted, they went loud and produced gobs of bass.
I was impatient to have it all. I wanted the sophistication, great midrange and soundstaging of the European speakers with the bass, dynamics and sheer fun of the American speakers. I also wanted to do it for a price that most people could afford... Although I personally enjoy the high-end as much as any foaming-at-the-mouth audiophile, the real challenge is to make good sounding stuff that real people can afford and can live with...
Now, in our efforts to achieve this goal...we were one of the first to use small, quick drive units to drive a much larger passive radiator. The idea was to take advantage of the speed and detail of the small driver combined with the ability of the larger passive radiator to produce deep bass with good efficiency.
Our first really successful model, the Monitor 7 (introduced in 1974), used a 6.5 inch drive unit coupled to a 10 inch passive radiator with a 1" inch soft dome tweeter. Even today it's tough to beat the Monitor 7 for musicality and involvement in a speaker that can still go loud and produce genuine deep bass...
We were very clever in using simple system designs built around high quality components and making sure that we could use the same components in many different products. In fact, until 1990 we used nothing but 6.5 inch drivers in all of our home products.
We also tried to manufacture as many of our own components as possible ourselves. As you can imagine we became very efficient at making very high quality 6.5 inch drivers."
For the unedited version, and lots more neat stuff about Polk, go here-
http://www.tnt-audio.com/intervis/polk_e.html
"....The early 70's was an interesting time for our industry. Especially in the UK there were some great sounding, very sophisticated speakers being produced like the Spendors and original Quad ESL's...These systems had great mid and vocal performance but were also pretty difficult for us Americans to live with. They wouldn't handle any power, had crappy bass and blew up if you looked at them sideways. In the US we had a whole bunch of basically terrible sounding loudspeakers...But, true to what the US market wanted, they went loud and produced gobs of bass.
I was impatient to have it all. I wanted the sophistication, great midrange and soundstaging of the European speakers with the bass, dynamics and sheer fun of the American speakers. I also wanted to do it for a price that most people could afford... Although I personally enjoy the high-end as much as any foaming-at-the-mouth audiophile, the real challenge is to make good sounding stuff that real people can afford and can live with...
Now, in our efforts to achieve this goal...we were one of the first to use small, quick drive units to drive a much larger passive radiator. The idea was to take advantage of the speed and detail of the small driver combined with the ability of the larger passive radiator to produce deep bass with good efficiency.
Our first really successful model, the Monitor 7 (introduced in 1974), used a 6.5 inch drive unit coupled to a 10 inch passive radiator with a 1" inch soft dome tweeter. Even today it's tough to beat the Monitor 7 for musicality and involvement in a speaker that can still go loud and produce genuine deep bass...
We were very clever in using simple system designs built around high quality components and making sure that we could use the same components in many different products. In fact, until 1990 we used nothing but 6.5 inch drivers in all of our home products.
We also tried to manufacture as many of our own components as possible ourselves. As you can imagine we became very efficient at making very high quality 6.5 inch drivers."
For the unedited version, and lots more neat stuff about Polk, go here-
http://www.tnt-audio.com/intervis/polk_e.html
