Polk L200 Speaker Demo Reviews

My impressions of the L200

I had a week with them and put some twenty hours of listening in on the L200 before I pulled them from the rig and passed them along to Rburgess714. The gear used for the demo included my Carver Tube amps, Pass Labs X0.2/XOno, Krell Evolution 505 SACD, TriangleART turntable with CA Goldfinger V2, and the PS Audio Perfectwave DAC bringing up the digital side. No direct comparison was done with the SDA-SRS 1.2TL, as that would have been a fool's errand.

I ran the L200 on a true double bi-wire run of Audioquest Meteor speaker cables. I did some cursory listening the first couple of days mostly as background music before really putting them through their paces.

I will copy and past my comments from the week here and address the points I was hinting at as I go forward...

nooshinjohn wrote: »

Not so fast my young Padawan. This gear is also good at exposing serious flaws. The first of which is these Polk logos on the face of the grills are hideous to look at on a speaker of this caliber. They should have used the signature of Matt Polk from the old SRS badges IMHO...

The appearance of these speakers did not grow on me at all during their time here. The logo on the grills was staring at me like a neon sign and did not evoke the air of class I have come to expect from a product at this price point. The wood veneer was nicely done, but I would have preferred some character there as well, especially since the outward appearance is that of a simple wooden box.

nooshinjohn wrote: »

First night is in the bag. I will be doing some tweaking of placement tomorrow, but so far they are sounding ok.

I found these speakers to shine or sink in performance based on placement. I don't know whet Polk recommends in this regard, but I found them to perform best when they are placed well out into the room, at least three feet. Toe-in is critical to focus the soundstage properly.

nooshinjohn wrote: »

One thing not discussed a bunch in the reviews so far is the redesigned Power Port on the back of the speaker. This is showing itself to perhaps be the most significant element of the new speaker, at least in my listening. It allows that speaker to perform as a modified dipole.... more to come.

This post drew the most curiosity, and it is easy to understand why. given how they were placed in my room for most of the time they were here, they were almost near-field in their placement, with two feet of space behind the speakers to my TL's. During a listening session, I thought it was sounding like I had sound coming directly from my center channel speaker. Given that the L200's were sitting 18 inches below and 42 inches in front of that center channel, I was surprised when I got up and walked behind them and could still hear sound coming from the back side of the L200's. I have only experienced this with dipole-type speakers like Magnepan and Martin Logans.

I placed my ear to the backs of the Power Ports, and sure enough, there was clear, tuneful and powerful sound being emitted from the ports, perhaps as much as 15 to 20 percent of the volume coming from the front, depending on volume and music type. This explained what I was hearing from the speakers themselves.

The L200 is a speaker that in many ways, punches well above it's diminutive size. When augmented with my REL, tuned to simply provide a foundation, base was fast, tight and accurate. With the REL off, the bottom end would be somewhat muddy as volume approached reference levels. With the REL engaged, everything from mids and highs, all the way down was very good. Imaging was off the chart with these on most types of music. In my listening, the soundstage was easily 3 feet behind and above the fronts of the speakers and extended well into the listening space and projected to the sides, above and below the plane.

On a few recordings, especially Linda Ronstadt's "What's New", it appeared at times that there was an orchestra performing from a pit in front of Linda's vocals, and feature musicians performing on risers behind her. This is something I do not experience with the big SDA's. I was very impressed more than a few times with the accuracy, imaging and sense of the acoustic space they provided.


This gear is also good at exposing serious flaws...

On the performance side, the L200's main weakness was being able to keep up with music that presented serious demands on them. Congested material such as heavy metal, sweeping orchestral pieces, and demanding movie soundtracks left the speakers stumbling through the material and just not able to keep up. This became particularly clear on the new "Terminator" 4k Blu-ray , "The Rise of Skywalker" soundtrack, and on just about anything by Metallica.

Having Jeff and Ray here this past weekend solidified what I was hearing, and I could not get back to my SDA's fast enough. It is not fair to expect a bookie-type speaker to compete with the big dogs.

I do, however remember the sound from the SDA-CRS from back in the day, and the L200 does an admirable job of providing a large and immersive soundstage in a smaller package. give them the room to breathe and some quality gear to move them, and they would make a nice addition to almost any listening space.