No, the new speaker's warmer, fuller tonal balance is more to our liking. Resolution of fine detail was quite good, and Mick Jagger's vocals were very natural, without any of the hard/thin quality we complained about when we reviewed the original SurroundBar and the Yamaha YSP-3000. The skinny SurroundBar 50, ably assisted by the Polk PSW111, didn't pull any punches so the Stones sounded live, and we could hear the concert venue's ambiance and space. The Rolling Stones Four Flicks DVD set's full-blown rock and roll made us sit up and take notice. (By comparison, the YSP-3000's surround effects were more uniformly projected throughout the room.) Likewise, the SurroundBar 50's spatial effects work best for listeners seated directly in line with the speaker-the "surround" sound collapses back into the speaker for listeners seated off to the right or left side of our couch. The Polk's soundfield is wide and had a nice sense of depth, but it never came forward or out to the sides of the CNET listening room like the Yamaha YSP-3000 or 4000. That said, the SurroundBar 50's handling of the film's surround sound was good, but not as three-dimensionally developed as what we heard from the Yamahas. The sound was remarkably pure and clear, much more so than what we've experienced with the Yamaha YSP-3000 single-speaker surround system. The sci-fi space-mission-to-the-sun flick is loaded with explosions and deep bass sounds, and the SurroundBar 50 (and its companion subwoofer) passed those torture tests with flying colors. We started our listening sessions with our new favorite demo, the Sunshine Blu-ray disc.
We did note it works best when we were at least 6 or 7 feet away from the SurroundBar 50. SDA Surround technology uses signal processing to produce "virtual" surround sound and can also work in stereo. Instead, the speaker produces its own surround ambiance, with an updated version of Polk's patented "SDA Surround" technology (Stereo Dimensional Array) that first appeared on the company's speaker systems in the late 1980s.
Unlike the Yamaha Digital Sound Projector single-speaker systems, the SurroundBar 50 doesn't rely on wall reflections and room acoustics to generate surround effects. It would have been more readable if each language's text were laid out in separate sections, as is the norm.
One gripe: each information section in the multilingual User's Guide has six languages, making things a little hard to decipher. The SurroundBar 50's User's Guide describes an alternative hookup method Polk claims produces even better blending between the speaker and sub, but the straightforward approach referred to above worked perfectly well. We used a Polk PSW111 sub to supply the missing bass for all of our listening tests, but any worthwhile sub should do the job. If that sounds a bit high, there's a reason: Polk doesn't claim the SurroundBar 50 is a "full range" design, so plan on adding a subwoofer. If you can set your AV receiver's crossover control, Polk recommends using 100 or 120 Hertz. Next, turn off all of the speaker delays (usually referred to as "speaker distance") by setting them to 0 feet.
#POLK AUDIO AUDIO BAR SPEAKER TERMINALS PLUS#
Speaker setup is a little easier than a standard 5.1 channel system: just bring up your AV receiver's setup menu and adjust the front left, center, and right speaker levels to "0 dB" and the surround channel to plus 3 dB. The latter might be preferable if only because Polk's color-coded cable eliminates the confusion some buyers might experience when hooking up so many wires on the speaker's crowded rear panel (and making a mistake with five pairs of otherwise identical speaker wires would be easy indeed). You use your own cables or the included 15-foot-long five-channel flat cable to hook up your SurroundBar 50 to an AV receiver or amplifier. The speaker's high-quality binding posts accept bare wire ends, spades, or banana plugs.
#POLK AUDIO AUDIO BAR SPEAKER TERMINALS DRIVERS#
The SurroundBar 50 is a five-channel speaker, but uses nine 3.5-inch midrange drivers and three 0.75-inch tweeters. It's available in Titanium or Black anodized finishes with matching cloth grilles. The speaker's extruded aluminum cabinet's deep curves and contemporary design was sized to match the width of 50-inch plasma and LCD screens: it measures 51 inches wide, 4.5 high, a little more than 5 inches deep, and weighs 15 pounds. The SurroundBar 50 can be shelf-mounted above or below flat screen TVs with the supplied "cradles," or wall-mounted with the included bracket.
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