Polk Audio RT-2000p
A floorstanding tower with a 200-watt powered subwoofer built into the cabinet. It sold for $1,900 a pair.
Overview
Two hundred watts of built-in subwoofer amplification, two 8-inch woofers in a vented enclosure, and a sealed upper chamber holding the midrange and tweeter — that's the shape of the RT-2000p, and it's an unusual one. Polk's pitch, as Audio (May 1998, p.65) framed it, was that the big companies can harvest the fruits of research more economically than the small esoteric firms, and the RT-2000p was the demonstration piece: a tower with a powered subwoofer and a pile of Polk's proprietary driver technology, priced at $1,900 per pair.
The driver array is the interesting part. A 6½-inch bass/midrange driver sits in the sealed upper chamber alongside the tweeter. The low-frequency work goes to the vented section below, with its pair of 8-inch drivers and that 200-watt amp. Polk built its drivers around geometries chosen to minimize resonances, a technique the company developed in cooperation with Johns Hopkins University and then applied to steadily refine its driver construction, reducing coloration and improving transparency, clarity, and dynamic-contrast reproduction. That's the marketing-adjacent version, anyway. What a reviewer actually heard is more useful.
Audio (May 1998, p.66) found the 6½-inch midrange handled transients and rapid musical changes very well, with a speed well matched to the tweeter's, so each driver reinforced the other's strengths. The same review noted the midrange didn't hold together at 90 dB SPL and higher, which is a real limitation if you like to run a system loud. The bass was the headline. Audio (May 1998, p.67) reported shocking effects on Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks, singling out the most extreme passages of Jurassic Park, and gave some of the credit to the Krell KAV-500 five-channel amplifier in the review system. The same piece concluded that the RT-2000p's weaknesses showed up in stereo listening. The home-theater strengths are easy to exploit with a good A/V preamp's crossover and delay adjustments, but two-channel buyers should know what they're getting into.
The integrated-subwoofer approach was novel enough that HiFi-Stereo (November 1997, p.31) flagged it in a new-products column. It described the built-in powered subwoofer with its two 8-inch drivers and 200-watt amp in a vented enclosure, with the sealed upper chamber above. Polk's own advertising, reproduced in Audio (September 1998, p.23), billed the RT2000p as delivering "exceptional performance to satisfy both audiophiles and film fanatics" and quoted a Home Theater review from February 1998. That's marketing copy, not an independent verdict.
The RT-2000p was a late-'90s bet that a buyer wanted one box per channel that could do both movies and music without a separate subwoofer, and that the money saved on the sub could go into the tower. Audio's reviewer came away impressed by the dynamics and the bass slam, and less impressed by the midrange under pressure and by straight stereo reproduction. The magazine gave the speaker a full "Auricle" treatment, which is more attention than most $1,900 towers got.
eBay Listings
As an eBay Partner, we earn from qualifying purchases. This helps support our independent vintage technology research.