My impressions of my new $25 crs speakers

bhancock

First off it's great to finally be in the club. A very good friend bought a pair of the BIG SDA's new years ago and was always impressed. I left the house today to pick up some second hand shelves from a junk guy I know. As I was leaving I noticed a dusty pair of speakers and on closer inspection I noticed the passive radiator on the back. I asked him for a price..... $25. Got em home.... dust washed right off, the drivers and tweeters are in perfect shape. I have to say the "oh no! not more speakers!" and the eye rolI I received from my girlfriend was epic. Needless to say I'm very, very pleased. No connection cable though, I ordered speakon connectors and some Mogami speaker cable to fix that. I believe these to be the first series as it has two tweeters.
My heavyweight champs of the house are a pair of JBL L7s. They are the last of the US made JBL's. If you have a room that you can get the JBL's placed right" at least three feet from back and side walls" then they are scary awesome. The JBL's also need mega power, I use two crown xls 1502s running about 350 wpc a piece. As for the Polk's I couldn't get them hooked up fast enough.... and man am I impressed even without them hooked together. These baby's crank out some serious ear candy, I have to say they punch way way above their weight class especially for a speaker made in 84 I believe. The treble's nicely detailed but more relaxed than the 35tia tweeters in the L7s, the bass response really surprised the hell out of me, tight as a drum...... Very impressive. I really like these Polk's. One thing I like is they actually sound better than my JBLs at lower volume. My JBLs just want to be played loud and seem to lose a little at low volume. Alan Parsons " I robot" sounds great a moderate volume where the JBL's just need more. Alison Krause and Union station live sounded great but didn't have the the sense of being drown in a tsunami of sound that the L7s can give but it's nice to be able to listen at a lower volume without feeling cheated. I glad I can say I'm glad I'm in the Polk SRS club now and even more glad to buy in at 25 bucks.

Nightfall

If you have side by side tweeters you don't have one of the SRS models.

EDIT: Just read CRS in the thread title. Derp.

$25 is quite the bargain indeed, congrats on the new speakers.

bhancock

SDA... always get those mixed up. Can and is it worth upgrading the tweeters on this model? I imagine it would need a resistor or lpad.

Nightfall

Forgot to say, once you get an interconnect made try disconnecting the SDA tweeter in each cabinet. They say it can be kind of phasey sounding which is part of the reason that later models don't use tweeters in the SDA arrays. You might also like it though, @nbrowser does.

bhancock

Thanks, I'll give it a listen. I'm really enjoying the heck out em so far. Think these will be pryed from my cold dead fingers speakers.

cortico

I have experimented the RDO-194 (new replacement tweeter from Polk) on the stereo and dimensional modules, with a .5ohm resistor in place of polyswitches.

I need to admit that I do like the way it sounds, it's a small nuance that makes it feel that am listening in a slightly bigger room.

Next will play a potentiometer to dial in the desired amounted.

cnh

Take those JBL off the Crown amps and give them some tubes! Those 35's love tubes, so do the Polks.

codycatalist

Good find and even better price. I would love to get my ears on some small SDAs. Yes upgrade the tweets and don't think twice. Best of luck!

bhancock

I use cd3 tube buffer with upgraded caps and national union black glass tubes to add a little richness to the sound and to sand the edges off the 35tia's..... works wonders.

bhancock

Cleaned up real nice, wish I would have taken a before pic, looked like real snotters.... grill cloth ended up in great shape too.

cortico

have you disconnected the dimensional array tweeter? any thoughts?