Rti's performance
Paramount Polk
Posts: 38
"If I remember correctly, Polk RTi's have a bit of a hotter midrange region and elevated treble....mostly due to lack of adequate baffle step compensation. Using the bass tone control might ameliorate this some, but to get it right, a redesign of the crossover is in order. Dennis Murphy did a redesign of some Polk RTi's awhile back. He came to about the same conclusion....not enough baffle step compensation, too hot a treble level altogether. This lack of tonal balance is going to equate to a piss-poor power response....regardless of how many watts you have in reserve in the amp you might run against them. It could be clipping, it could be placement, but most likely it is the speaker themselves....and poor power response/tonal balance. The cabinetry is pretty well constructed, and the drivers aren't all that bad, but the crossover definitely leaves something to be desired. You need to have a custom crossover done for them."
Helping me along with my Rti4 issues on another forum... what do you guys think about this??
Helping me along with my Rti4 issues on another forum... what do you guys think about this??
Receiver- Onkyo TX-SR304S
Speakers- Front-Polk Rti4
Rear- Bose 161
Center- Bose Cubes
Subwoofer- composed of
-PIONEER TS-W251R 10" SUBWOOFER
-Dayton 1.0 CU FT SUBWOOFER CABINET
-DAYTON SA240-B 240W Sub Plate Amp
Desktop
-AMD Athlon 3000+ 1.8Ghz
- Geforce 6600
- 512mb Ram upgrading soon...
- 80 Gig HD 160 Gig Slave HD
- ECS Nforce-A939 Motherboard
Speakers- Front-Polk Rti4
Rear- Bose 161
Center- Bose Cubes
Subwoofer- composed of
-PIONEER TS-W251R 10" SUBWOOFER
-Dayton 1.0 CU FT SUBWOOFER CABINET
-DAYTON SA240-B 240W Sub Plate Amp
Desktop
-AMD Athlon 3000+ 1.8Ghz
- Geforce 6600
- 512mb Ram upgrading soon...
- 80 Gig HD 160 Gig Slave HD
- ECS Nforce-A939 Motherboard
Post edited by Paramount Polk on
Comments
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Well I agree that the treble is quite hot on the RTi4 that is for sure. How to fix it, I am not sure... my ears just have a hard time with that particular dome tweeter polk uses on the RTi. I think the midbass driver is ok, but I feel like the tweeter and crossover could use some work. The enclosure is definately good for the price point, I dig the real wood use too.
I think bass performance could be increased if polk wasn't using two ports. I don't know many other high end bookies with two ports. My PSB alpha Bs have 1 rear port and bass that easily bests the RTi4, yet it is a smaller speaker with smaller woofer... it's also at 91db 8ohms... I am just saying that while the RTi4 is a good speaker, it could have been a better speaker.
The hot tweeter, that is good for some people... SACD lovers with 24bit 192k upsampling DACs would find that good recordings are going to sound good on the speaker... but not so good recordings are going to give you a headache.
