Surround Sound System Reviews

A/V gear used for home theater testing included a Marantz SR6014 receiver, Roku Streaming Stick+, and an Oppo UDP-203 Ultra HD Blu-ray player. Along with playing discs, I tapped the Oppo player as a Roon endpoint for music streaming. Since Polk Audio didn't send along a subwoofer, I configured the Marantz AVR to run the R600 towers full-range, with the center, surrounds, and height modules crossed over at 80Hz. While its' always prefer- able to use a capable subwoofer to deliver LFE effects for movies, low-frequency sweep test tones revealed usable bass extension down to 30Hz, along with sufficient output for my medium-size room home theater room.

Movies Performance
The first movie I watched with the system was Christopher Nolan's Tenet, a disc with a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack. In a scene where The Protagonist and crew hijack a plane prior to takeoff and deliberately crash it into a storage terminal, the roar of the plane's engines as it got abruptly re-directed had impressive heft. Sound effects like metal ingots tossed from cargo onto the tarmac and vehicles getting crushed underneath were conveyed with impressive detail and precision, and when the slow- moving plane finally struck the wall of the terminal, resulting in a fiery explosion, the bass impact I heard was thoroughly satisfying.

To check out the system's immersive capability, I next cued up the recent Ultra HD Blu-ray release of 2014's Godzilla, a disc with an ear-opening Dolby Atmos soundtrack. In a scene where the big boy himself arrives in downtown Honolulu, the air force fighters flying overhead had a believable sense of height—the sound of the planes seemed to emanate from well above the screen, and the Reserve system conveyed their passage in a consistent manner from left to right, and from the rear to the front of the room. Later, as the military fires up at Godzilla from the top of buildings, I experienced a clear sense of the upward—and downward—trajectory of their missiles and flares.

What's a monster movie without a Battle of the Titans? Fortunately, Godzilla has them to spare, and when a radiation- eating MUTO (Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organism) arrives for a piece of our boy GZ, its footfalls displayed suit- able heft, while the metallic- sounding roars it emitted had a powerful envelope that was truly unnerving. When Godzilla then steps up to get in a few hits, his footfalls sounded deeper and notably louder than the MUTO's (guess who's gonna win this fight?) and his roars had a room-filling effect, with the annoyed-sounding vocalizing seeming to emanate equally from each speaker in the Reserve system.

Craving more Titan-on-Titan action, I streamed Godzilla vs. Kong on HBO Max. And while that film's Atmos soundtrack lacked the dynamic impact of Godzilla (a limitation of streaming as compared with disc-based playback, perhaps?), effects like the giant lizard's laser-like fire-breathing still had a strong trajectory as it sliced through the air. Dialogue in the scenes leading up to the main Godzilla vs. Kong bout—which takes place on an aircraft carrier at sea, no less—had consistently good clarity. I also had no complaints about tonal shifts in human voices when sitting off to one side of my six-foot-wide couch. And while I had no issues with dialogue sounding strained in my medium-sized home theater, I also wondered if the Reserve series' R400 "Performance" center speaker would do better justice to the titanic roars of Godzilla, Kong, and crew, especially in a larger room.

Music Performance
The next step in my Reserve series test was to move the R600 tower speakers into my 20 x 16 x 9-foot living/music room for a stereo audition. I connected them to a 2 x 150-watt Hegel Music Systems H190 integrated amplifier and used an ELAC Discovery DS-S101-G server running Roon as a music source and also played CDs. The speakers went in my usual location about 1.5-feet out from the back wall and 8 feet away from the main listening seat, spread wide and toed inward.

Similar to the Legend L800 towers, I found that the R600s had a revealing quality, bringing forth detail in well-recorded tracks, as well as highlighting shortcomings in others. This dual ability was clearly demonstrated when I listened to Lana del Rey's latest, Chemtrails over the Country Club. The first track, "White Dress," has a wispy, hotly recorded vocal track, and it sounded almost too thin, trebly, and in-your-face for comfort. Skipping forward to "Dark But Just a Game," a track with a more balanced mix, del Rey's voice came across as lush and finely textured, and it emerged fully formed between the speakers. The song's low, almost subsonic electronic bass notes sounded powerful and deep, with the R600 managing to pressurize the room in the same manner I'd expect when using a good separate subwoofer or two.

Listening next to guitarist Bill Frisell's "Valentine," from the album of the same name, I heard well-proportioned sound, with the guitar strings coming through crisp and trebly, but also with a sense of "roundness" and texture. The standup bass displayed good definition throughout its full range, never once sounding tubby or weak. Most impressive, though, was the drum solo toward the track's end, which the Reserve R600 towers rendered with notable dynamic drive while also managing to convey cymbals in an airy manner.

U.K.-based Producer/ composer Hannah Peel's album Fir Wave is a contemporary re-imagining of the electronic music experiments of British pioneer Delia Derbyshire and the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. Playing the track "Emergence in Nature" about 10dB above my preferred listening level, the Polk towers easily and gracefully handled the propulsive beats and pulsating synths. Imaging
also extended well beyond the physical boundaries of the speaker positions, resulting in an ultra-wide, near-wraparound presentation that hinted at my previous experience listening with the SDA Pro-equipped Legend 800 towers.

Speaking of Legends, I fortunately had a set of Legend series L100 bookshelf models ($999/pair) on hand to compare with the R200s. After placing both speaker pairs in turn on stands in the same positions where I had put the towers and then matching their levels using pink noise test tones, I listened to a few reference music tracks and was impressed with the close tonal match between the two. With its larger 6.5-inch mid-bass driver, there was a bit more low-end kick coming from the R200, but the Legend bookshelf with its 5.5-inch mid- bass driver was certainly no slouch in that department. Both models displayed a pleasing overall tonal balance with clean, satisfying bass impact for a bookshelf speaker. I think most listeners would be happy with either and would certainly find the Reserve series R200s to be a steal at $699/pair.

Conclusion
After having lived with Polk Audio's Reserve series system for several months, I'm pleased to report no complaints about its performance, especially given the affordable price tag. Would the addition of a subwoofer result in lower bass extension and higher overall dynamics when watching action movies? Probably, but in the medium-sized room where I mainly used the system, the bass was more than satisfying with most movies I watched and music I listened to. Would Polk Audio's larger "Perfor- mance" center speaker have conveyed Godzilla's screams with greater impact? Possibly, but dialogue with the R300 center was natural-sounding and consistently clear, even from the far side of my couch. You could certainly spend more to get great sound in your home theater (sky's the limit, actually), but this Polk Audio Reserve series package proves you don't really have to.