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Polk SDA Compact

tonyk

tonyk

AK Subscriber
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I picked these up the other day for a song and I'm pleasantly surprised. I've never owned any Polk speakers, much less any of the SDA series, so I've been a bit excited to give these a go in the upstairs rig. Driver compliment is two 1" inch tweeters and two 6.5" mid/woofers with a 10" passive radiator in the back.

These throw pretty impressive soundstage for such a compact monitor. They're relatively efficient at 92db, and will play very loud if I shoot the juice to them. Right now I'm running them on my spare Technics integrated (100wpc 8 ohms) and they sound pretty good, the Compacts are 6 ohm rated. I read though that they really come alive with 200 watt and up amplification. I wouldn't mine hearing them with a big Ashly Fet or something similar.

Although they sound just fine by themselves, I'll probably end up running a subwoofer with these as I've become addicted to the sound of my Maggies with a sub, but for now they're making nice music upstairs all on their own.

Next up is to make some proper stands in order to get them up in the air a bit more, right now they're sitting on speaker stands on top of speaker stands, ha!

Anyway, here's a couple quick pics.

image.jpeg image.jpeg

And a quick pic of the passive in the back.
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Congrats! I see you're running an interconnect cable - excellent. And peerless tweeters, also excellent. Welcome to the Polk world. There's a well defined upgrade path involving re-capping, gluing driver magnets in place to prevent shifting, using hurricane nuts or rings to seal everything to the cabinet, installing sound deadening, and dynamatting the driver / PR frames. Yes, they will react well to more power too!

Head over to Polk's Vintage Speakers forum for details. http://forum.polkaudio.com/categories/vintage-speakers
 
Yes Johnny_Law, I've been over there and I have been perusing the VR3 mods pdf. There's a ton of info in that PDF that's gonna take a while soak in. I look forward to taking these things to the next level.

One thing's for sure, the sound is not compact as the name implies. Big sound in a small form factor.
 
Nice speakers, been looking at a pair on the auction site, priced too high though. How can you tell if the driver magnets have shifted? Thanks!
 
I'd like to have a pair of CRS myself. I've heard most say they will image better if you disconnect the dimensional tweeter.

A midwoofer with a shifted magnet will have a scratchy feeling when you press on the cone. Or more times then not, the cone won't move at all. They can be realigned so don't throw them away if you have one(s) shifted.
 
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