Why does polk wireless SR2 speaker require 2 Apps that want access to every permission on cell phone

Francisco_Villa

I bought a polk wireless SR2 from Frys and it was difficult to get it to work and it did not have bluetooth which is easy to get working. What made me angry was I needed to download two polk apps and both apps wanted every permission on my cell phone including making phone calls. Then after all the trouble setting it up I was very disappointed in the sound quality. I have Polk Floor Standing speakers which excel in sound so I expected high quality sound. Instead these wireless SR2 speakers sounded like someone talking with both hands covering their nose and mouth. The high frequencies were absent and the middle freqencies was weak and lacking as well and was drowned out by the muddy loud base. When I was in the store the SR2 was not working so I couldn't hear it and bought the speaker solely on polks reputation (which has apparently changed for the worst with these wireless speakers). I returned the speakers because they sounded awful and in the future I will not buy speakers that is so complicated to set up that they require two cell phone apps that want every permission on my cell phone including making phone calls in order to work. Next time I wont buy solely on reputation and if the speaker isn't working and I cant hear it I wont buy it. Also I'll make sure that the speaker does not require me to install phone apps that want absolute total access to everything on my cell phone. Polk should not cut corners on sound quality like Polk did on these awful wireless SR2 speakers. My friend has a JBL Flip 3 that sounds way better than these SR2 speakers and he didn't need to download spyware apps on his cell phone to play music on the JBL Flip 3's. These Polk SR2's were a real disappointment to me.

Francisco_Villa

I'm hoping Polk will realize that the most important thing to a customer who is buying a speaker is the sound quality. As an Audio Speaker customer I'm not interested in hiring the geek squad to get my speakers to work or spending hours to set it up to play music or downloading a bunch of shady apps to get it to work. Something is wrong when the app wants permission to make phone calls. It should be easy to play music to the speakers and it should not require any spyware apps just to play music through those speakers.

[Deleted User]

Hello Francisco,
Welcome to Polk's forum. Maybe I can (with the help of Polk's wireless experts) allay some of your concerns.
The permissions we ask are very typical, some are to access your on board music, some are to help find and setup devices, some are for data collections. We do have basic information capture from general app usage (as described in the EULA), which only measures simple figures like play time, times played, and specific selections, which is often requested by the streaming partners themselves for their own use. Any of this data we do capture is entirely anonymized (since it’s just numbers without identifiers) and kilobytes at most.
The other factor you mention is the sound quality, particularly the over abundance of bass information has been addressed. The newest utility app update helped tune the S2 by reducing bass and smoothing out the frequency response.
I hope this is helpful information.
Regards, Ken