Polka Polka Polk! RT55s

Ah, some of my favorite speakers in the world. The venerable Polk Audio RT55. Similar (actually almost exactly the same) to the RT55i, except it has black cones, not blue, and the veneer is vinyl not real wood.

Otherwise the drivers are exactly the same, and the specs as well.

Dual 6.5" woofers, a 1" trilaminate dome tweeter. 35hz-26khz.

Up to 200watts each!

Why do I like them so much? Well my dad has a pair, and has had them for well over ten years now. They have always impressed me as a "bookshelf" speaker, as they give the fuller sound of floorstanders. At his house they were set up in his bedroom 5.1/7.2 system for a number of years, on stands for his Yamaha powered system. They're biampable/biwirable so you can hook them up with some serious power, yet choose the type of amplification for high and low if you want a preferred sound.

I drove all the way out to Blanchard, OK to get these. The crazy guy selling them only wanted $50 for the speakers, or $100 for the whole setup - a 5 disc Sony CD changer, some cheap Sony DE-197 receiver, and the RT55s of course. I thought about buying the whole setup but decided I already have like 5 cd changers and an equivalent amount of receivers so I just took the speakers.

Taking them home was exciting, as it was almost an hour drive from the middle of nowhere, and the weather turned bad. Well I got them home and hooked them up, oh boy do they sing. Currently they sit attached to my Sony 555ES receiver with a healthy 120watts per channel powering them. There's a matching Polk CS-250 as the center and a Klipsch KSW-10 to round it off. No 5.1 in this room, our bedroom is too small and I sure as hell am not climbing up in our attic to run rear speakers if not necessary. I had a pair of Polk RT25s in tow for that job but decided to give them to my dad instead since he wanted an all-Polk 7.1 system (with the same RT55s mentioned earlier).

Music is definitely punchy as these are renowned for their bass response from such a small cabinet. Treble is well rounded and not too harsh. You can set these as large speakers if you want, however I let the receiver do the bass management and set them to small. They do 80hz on up and the rest goes to the subwoofer.

Ever since my dad got a pair, I wanted one. They ran well over $700 a pair so I never had the opportunity to buy them myself. At $50 for the pair I didn't drive, I floored it to get them. It is doubtful I will get rid of these any time soon, and when we move into a new house they are definitely coming with.

Ratings:

Price: $50
Status: Keeper
Condition: 5.00 Stars
Cost: 1.0 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Potential Income: Unknown

LOUD ASS MUSIC

So I was at Goodwill again two weeks ago, and did the 60 second tour. Nothing great, except this giant-ass black cabinet. Even larger than the Klipsch Forte II's, and covered in the same material as the Peavey gear from not too long ago.

What was it? A Yamaha S4115h speaker. I have no idea what type of speaker it is. I assume it's for live sound, or some PA equipment. It uses those 1/4" jacks which I still have, but unfortunately I have no amp. Also, there's only one speaker! What the hell is with people donating only one speaker! Oh well it's $10, so I decide to buy it. It's got a huge metal horn on top, and a 15" woofer below. I bet the efficiency on this thing is far north of 95db, meaning it will get loud, with almost no power.

I roll this outside and try to fit it in my car. No go. We wrestle for it a bit and somehow get it in the back seat. Well I get it home and it sits in the garage for two weeks. Rosey doesn't even notice it for most of that time. Meanwhile I'm looking for a way to power this thing. None of my amps or receivers output with a 1/4" phono plug. The Peavey PA-400 did, but that's long gone. I went to Guitar Center and picked up a 1/4" female to banana plug adapter (I have a 1/4" 6ft speaker cable at home from the PA-400). In addition I found an E-MU 1212m sound card that I'm going to try out. It was $40.

What's funny is the adapter for the speaker was $15!!! The damn speaker was only $10. Not the greatest investment ever. Well I was lazy for a week and never hooked it up, so on a subsequent visit to the Goodwill they apparently found some 20ft 1/4" to banana plug cables. They had two of them which lead me to believe there should be another speaker...somewhere. Anyways the cables were only $1 each so I bought them up and returned the adapter.

This weekend I pulled the Onkyo DS575 5.1 receiver out of the closet and dragged it to the garage with my laptop. I plugged it all up, and noticed there was something stuck in one of the inputs of the speaker. I grabbed it with my Gerber multi-tool (thanks Rosey!) and yanked it out. Well it was a broken off 1/4" phono that someone must have sheared off. Powered it on and turned up the volume slowly.

Test material? Journey Remastered in FLAC lossless through my USB Creative MP3+ adapter, using RCA interconnects to the receiver. I guess I could have used the optical out, oh well.

So I turned it up to 50, or half with the speaker facing away and I could hear it clearly reflecting off the building.... 200 feet away across the street. Wow this thing is loud. The sound quality? Well it IS a PA speaker, so it wasn't that great. That's not really what it was designed for anyways, so no big deal. This thing is a HUGE party speaker. Just one channel running not even close to a full 80 watts @ 8 ohms was breaking 100db easily. Rosey came running outside like something had blown up and told me she couldn't hear the TV inside the house because it was so loud. I only had it up half way! I cleaned it up a little, there was dust all over it and inside the horn, and it only got louder.

Rosey wants me to sell it. It was only $10... I wonder if I can get $200 out of it? I'm not sure. I'll test the waters. If not I'm going to Ace hardware, ordering some chains and hanging it from the garage ceiling.

Ratings:

Price: $10
Status: Stored
Condition: 3.00 Stars
Cost: .5 Stars
Flippable: 3.5 Stars
Potential Income: Unknown