Polk Audio SurroundBar 50 Surround System (Single Speaker, Black)

Other products by Polk Audio

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 51 x 5.1 x 4.5 inches ; 20 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 21 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• Note: Gift-wrapping is not available for this item.
• ASIN: B000WGLZRO
• Item model number: AM5045-A
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #30 in	Electronics > Home Audio & Theater > Home Theater Systems > Speaker Systems
  #46 in	Electronics > Home Audio & Theater > Speakers > Home Theater Speaker Systems

• Date first available at Amazon.com: September 27, 2007

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Complete Your Home Theater with One Speaker

The Polk Audio SurroundBar is designed to complete your High Definition TV experience. It’s the perfect match for flat-panel and shallow screen TVs. And it works with any surround sound receiver in any room to bring you the thrills of 5 channel surround sound from a single speaker. The SurroundBar’s unobtrusive design and color-coded hookup configuration make it a welcome addition for anyone who wants the thrilling benefits of 5.1 surround sound and none of the hassles.

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Patented SDA Surround Technology Delivers a Full Room of Sound

Get professional surround-sound from a single speaker bar, regardless of your room's layout

Our patented SDA Surround technology means there’s no need to install rear speakers. SDA Surround creates a completely immersive 5 channel surround experience, as if there were dozens of speakers all around you, all from a single, 43-inch long cabinet. No rear speakers are required. This technology is based on fundamental research into the way our ears process sound and perceive the direction of sounds.

The SurroundBar works in any room; SDA Surround is not dependent on your room's walls to produce the surround effect. It uses a patented combination of signal processing and acoustical geometry that complements the spacing between your ears to produce surround sound without the need for rear mounted speakers or special room characteristics.

Some other single speaker surround solutions bounce sound off of walls and require symmetrical rooms and un-cluttered side and rear walls to create a surround effect. Since the SurroundBar works directly with the hearing mechanism and requires no special room characteristics, it can deliver a room-filling 5 channel surround experience in nearly any location.

SDA Surround technology relies on a mixture of acoustical engineering, psychoacoustic principles and a little magic. The original SDA technology, developed in the early 1980's, was a two-channel technology intended to overcome a fundamental problem of stereo reproduction. SDA Surround utilizes the same basic principles but expands the technology to allow for reproduction of surround sound without the need for rear speakers. This technology requires no reflecting surfaces or special speaker placement and can be connected to any surround sound receiver. It will work well in almost any room of any size or shape and will deliver a surround sound experience for almost all listener locations. Because of the psychoacoustic principles on which the technology is based, SDA Surround achieves exceptional continuity side-to-side and front-to-back so that sounds closely follow the action suggested on screen. It also delivers consistent soundstage depth, even directly to the sides, a quality only achieved by the best conventional hard wired systems. This quality makes SDA Surround seem more like having dozens of speakers around you providing smoother and more immersive surround sound.

Innovative Design with Simple Installation

Seven 3 ½" Dynamic Balance Drivers and three ¾" Dynamic Balance Dome Tweeters deliver clear, natural midrange, high frequencies and lifelike imaging. An aluminum-extruded enclosure eliminates cabinet resonance. The anti-diffraction grille and bezel help create open, spacious imaging. And it's magnetically shielded, of course, for safe placement on or near TVs.

Installation versatility is designed in. You can wall mount the SurroundBar right below your flat-panel TV. Or use the included cradle on a TV stand, a shelf or for set-top placement. The Polk Audio SurroundBar is a welcome addition for anyone who wants all the thrills of surround sound…but none of the hassles or clutter.

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Technical Specifications

Driver Complement: 9 x 3.5" composite cones

Magnet Structure: Neodymium drivers

Tweeters: 3 x 3/4" silk dome

Nominal Impedance: 8 ohms

Recommended Amplification: 150 watts/channel

Frequency Response: 80 Hz - 23 KHz

Efficiency: 90 dB

Bass Technology: Dual front ports

Dimensions (W x H x D): 51" x 4.5" x 5.1"

Weight: 15 lbs

Product Description

The Polk Audio SurroundBar 50 is 51" wide to offer an enveloping surround sound experience to anyone who wants better sound from their TV but does not want to install rear-mounted speakers. It delivers surround sound from a single, multi-driver loudspeaker located under or over the TV screen using SDA Surround technology. SDA Surround technology uses a patented combination of signal processing and acoustical geometry that complements the spacing between your ears to produce surround sound without the need for rear mounted speakers. It can deliver a room-filling surround experience in nearly any location in almost any type of room with no special room characteristics required. The SurroundBar 50 is sized to match the width of 50" Plasma and LCD TVs. In addition to using SDA Surround technology on the surround channels, the SurroundBar 50 adds SDA Surround image enhancing technology on the front Left & Right channels to further enhance the surround experience as well as produce a huge stereo sound field from a two-channel source. New drivers and crossover design along with a larger enclosure produce far better bass performance than the original SurroundBar. The aluminum enclosure houses nine mid/bass drivers with Neodymium magnets, three dome tweeters and a four-PC board crossover with over 60 components.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great Surround Sound, February 5, 2008

By	Baris Seker (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I got the SurroundBar 50 last week after a few days of research. If you're researching for single speaker surround sound solutions that means you cannot run wires in your room thanks to the landlord or your wife (welcome to my world hehe).

You have couple of options when you're looking for a single speaker solution for your home theater project, and I was down to Yamaha and Polk Audio. Between the two I chose Polk Audio over Yamaha because (A) Yamaha requires a perfect 4 wall room so that sound can bounce back off the walls and create the surround sound effect, which I don't have (cathedral ceiling, staircase in the middle of the house so no back wall and side walls are far apart.) and (B) Yamaha costs way more. Don't get me wrong, Yamaha is awesome from what I read on Amazon and on other sites, but SurroundBar/SurroundBar 50 plus a decent subwoofer cost less than a Yamaha (which has an integrated subwoofer).

To pair with my SurroundBar 50, I bought a Velodyne Minivee 10 subwoofer. It was a bit of an overkill in my situation. But I wanted to spend a bit more and get a great sounding sub in case I wanted to build a better home theater one day. You can pair SurroundBar 50 with any Polk Audio sub out there. PSW111 is a good one for example. I have an Onkyo A/V Receiver and an Onkyo DVD player. The setup was fairly easy. SurroundBar 50 comes with the audio cables ready to be hooked up between the bar and your receiver. Everything is color coded so you can't really go wrong here. I hooked up an RCA audio cable between my receiver and my sub's line level inputs. Total setup = 1 hour or less.

After configuring my receiver to use the new bar and sub, I tested the surround sound with Matrix, Gladiator and Pitch Black DVDs. SurroundBar 50 produces the "enveloping sound" as promised. I still need some adjustments to do later but so far I'm pretty impressed with what I have. The SDA technology Polk Audio offers does a great job. This product will NOT give you a true 5.1 surround sound experience, so if you're an audiophile this is not for you. This product performs really well in creating the 5.1 effect. In Pitch Black you really hear those flying creatures moving around and in Matrix it's a pleasure hearing bullets flying by and ricocheting.

Overall I'm very impressed. I'm just happy I was able to setup a surround sound system under an hour and without running wires going through walls and furniture and carpet etc. Your experience may vary from mine so go to your local electronics store and give this a test. If your wife is like mine who is against speakers and wires around the room then SurroundBar might be the solution for you too. :)

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars really does create surround sound!, February 13, 2008

By	Daniel Caruso (Reno) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I didn't want to run wires all over ant the wife acceptance factor played heavily in choosing a Surroundbar. The SB50 perfectly fit the width of our TV stand and having SDA for both front and rear pairs improved the surround effect compared to the original SB. It also performs well with music by using Dolby PL-II music setting on my Onkyo SR605. Definitely needs a subwoofer for home theater and base-heavy music also benefits. I chose a PSW505 and it's the ideal match for the SB50 in a room 20'x40'x11' ceiling. When surround effects are active in a movie or XM radio I can 'hear' sounds all around me. The only place the SDA doesn't reach is creating sounds 'behind' me. I experimented with a wired speaker directly behind the seating area and it didn't seem to add much. Now that I better understand the surround options on the receiver I'm going to try it again. Not sure how I'll sell that to the wife.
The description and photo on Amazon for the SB50 is actually for the original SB. The SB50 has 9 drivers (4 pair of SDA drivers and a single center channel speaker) and is ported.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Polk Sound, March 25, 2008

By	50Gran (Atlanta, USA) - See all my reviews

I've had this product for a month now and love it. When I first installed it, my subwoofer (HSU Research VTF2-MK3) had not arrived. This allowed me to see the quality of the surroundbar 50 by itself. It is an excellent product that will deliver very clean, if not a little sharp, sound. Given the size of the midrange drivers you can't get a real bass response without a subwoofer, but you do get crisp treble and solid midrange. Polk actually recommends that you use a subwoofer for best sound quality and attach the subwoofer to the L/R inputs of the receiver. I set mine up this way and the blend between the subwoofer and surroundbar is surprisingly good. In fact, it's exceptional! It sounds like the bass is coming from the surroundbar even though I know it isn't. Plus with the surroundbar, you really do get quality surround sound with DVDs or broadcasts in HD. Sure this speaker won't beat a 5.1 or 7.1 system with individual speakers for each channel, but I use this in my open plan living room and it is so much sleeker than the typical 5.1 system. Plus I don't have to run wires everywhere. And the surround sound is good.

The speaker is great for audio as well. You can crank it up pretty loud and it still sounds clear and undistorted. Again just make sure you have the subwoofer in place if you want bass response.

One more thing. The surroundbar50 is just a speaker. There's no signal processing done by it, so you'll need a receiver for the dolby digital and DTS effects. Overall I think this is a great solution for people who want surround sound without 5-7 speakers. I can't speak for the 42" surroundbar as I haven't heard one, but the surroundbar 50 is great.