My pictures from the Polk Audio Headquarters Tour

[nadams]

Yes, I know that there's going to be an official gallery up soon, but I figured I'd just throw all my pics up for you folks to look at. I didn't take any of them out, so you're seeing every pic I took.


Welcome!


The Model 9's


Some SRT's set up in the conference room.


Car audio gear lying about in the conference room.


A poster I kinda liked, unfortunately I hadn't gotten the knack of standing slightly to the side to avoid flash reflection...


LSIs in the conference room.


I think they're trying to hide it....


Big-daddy SDA's in the hallway outside the conference room.


More of the hall-o-vintage polk.


The first speaker with the polk name.


Another Polk PA speaker.

More to come in a few mins.

[Mike682]

Hey....there are the model 9s I helped with the handoff...cool :D

I feel proud they made it back to the Polk and I was part of it :D

[nadams]

Minimonitors!


Awards for the car-audio guys.


Starting to gather in the conference room.


Explaining The Klippel machine


Example of a Klippel measurement


I should make one of these for my bedroom door...


Testing an in-wall speaker in the... floor... of the nearly anechoic chamber


Still needs a few more wedges.


From left to right- Danger Boy, ND13, Beardog. ND13 and Beardog appear to have seen something shocking, while Danger Boy remains oblivious.


Ah, yes... the eeeevil SoundBar :P


The car speaker testing board. All quick release baffles for easy swapping in and out of drivers.


A few car audio drivers laying about...


This board worked a bit better than your typical CC/BestBuy offering.


Yes, #3 is the SR6500 system. They sounded better than the B&W's in the next pic, in my opinion.


$5500 worth of speakers, nearly, if not totally bested by the $750 SR6500 car speakers.

[ninerbj]

Anything new in the Floorstanding line, or are they hiding that stuff?

[nadams]

Behind the scenes of the car audio switchboard.


GTI color matcher for making sure the standards are the correct colors.


ND13 and Amulford in the Cheese Room, an anechoic chamber. I think amulford is about to take my camera from me...


Crossovers, anyone?


Having all the crossover components allows them to make changes, and retest it, without having to leave the room. This is where your crossovers get tweaked to perfection!


More crossover components.


A parting shot of the cheese room.


The in-wall testing room. Home of the IP-Addressable speakers!


Some of the unfinished inwall/infloor subs.


A round inwall, IP addressable. Notice the USB port there? need to make a few adjustments???


The back, with the built-in amp, network ports, and RCA ports.


Another tweakable crossover board.


A miniature set of SRTs... obviously a mock-up only. Take note of the speaker board behind them.... we dont' know the story on these...


Matt's plaything?


An interesting "design"


3d modeling.


Some prototypes for the inwall ip addressable speakers.


Explaining the laser goo thingy.


:D

Still more to come...

[nadams]

The guts of the amp they designed to drive the inwall/infloor subs. each one can drive two subs. It's got a BASH amp, and you can plug in chips to change the tone of the amp to match which sub you buy.



the Geeks Gecko!


Amulford- can I go in? I wanna go in!


Laser goo machine at work


you can kinda see the profile of the object it's creating in this pic.


The oven they bake the things in after they're done.


Weather tester.


Part of the original warehouse. This is where they built speakers in-house.


The SRT room is tucked in a corner of the warehouse.


Oh yes, we will be having fun!


I can't really caption this, because I'm not certain what it is. ND13 was excited over it, so it must be cool. It's a Marantz something...


Some drivers in the warehouse.


More.


More of the original factory part, now turned warehouse.


That's the guy!


The speaker building bench.


Another poster I liked.


More of the driver building bench.


A new room, built for testing inwalls.


Umm... what are these here for?


Tahoe or something w/ 24" rims


Very sweet WRX STI


Mmmm... plus it has the SR6500's!!!


From a rolled Polk show vehicle.


Starting lunch.


Catered and all!


Cake!


I think Russ got ahold of Matt...


The power of zoom tells me, yes, he did...


Polk's in-house band. Well, most of them.


Mr. Polk moving around to different groups of weird internet-people.


The longest dimension of the building.


Down the back...


Rejoining in the conference room to split up into our demo groups.


One of the new IP addressable in-walls, with no grill.


The two boards connected by a network patch cable are two of the mainboards out of the ipaddressable speakers, amps and all.


The back of the WRX STI. Set up for swapping gear in and out.


The back of one of Polks Honduh somethingorothers.


Preeety liiiights...


Momo Much?


W/ Flash


yeah, even surround sound!


Front


Being terribly impressed by the SoundBar.


Back of the SoundBar.


Some non-working prototypes of new Momo subs. The one on the right will have two Neodymium magnet structures, one on top, one on the bottom, for a possible THREE INCHES of sub travel, and a VERY flat power curve. They said they're having problems finding a spider that can hold up to the excursion.


Matt telling us tales of house-building and his going on 7 years "temporary house"


Got my sign signed!


Polk freebies. XRt12 XM tuner, shirt, and polk audio patch.


My rack, now with a Denon DCD-610 CD player (thanks Doro!), and a Polk XRt12 tuner.

Thanks so much every one at Polk, for putting up with us traipseing through your office... thanks to Doro for putting this together, and EVERYONE who took part! It was fun!

[Roy Munson]

Great pics!!!

Looks like it was a good show.

[Mike682]

Wow....thanks for the pics.

I would love to have one of those freebie packs!!

[SCompRacer]

Thanks for sharing with pictures nadams! Great job!

[Shizelbs]

Thanks a lot. I'm already having one great effing day at work at this just made it worse. Good work.

[nadams]

Sorry, shiz... But I just _had_ to!

Also, I just opened up my Polk shirt, and noticed that it doesn't just have the Polk audio logo! Lookie-

[IMG] [/IMG]

[polkatese]

cool pics, nadams! thanks for sharing...now, where's the annual doro humping russ pics? :)

[PolknPepsi]

The damaged center channel (?) looks like it had been stomped on but the nice looking mini monitors made up for it. The Gecko was odd and the cake under the lunch tent looked delicious. My two favorite pics were the Marantz player and Matthew Polk.

Thanks for the pics...my computer should recover from the huge download.

[McLoki]

Glad to see even polk knows a great amp when they hear one. Cinepro Rocks.... :D

Michael

BTW - thanks for the pics, looks like you guys had a great time. I hope to be a part of the next one.....

[fireshoes]

Thanks for all the pics, Noah!

[jcaut]

That is just awesome!! Sure wish I could have been there!

I've said this before, but what other company would pay that much attention to a group of internet forum guys? I mean, even if you put aside all the freebies and such..... that's just amazing. Thank you, Polk, for making it happen! I WILL make it to one of these in the future!

Thanks nadams for all the pictures. They were just right: Didn't bog down my dial-up too bad.

Jason

[jet2001]

Yes,thank you for the pics!

[nadams]

Polkatese- i would imagine those pics will surface from _todays_ activities. Doro and Russ were on their best behavior at Polk HQ :)

Polknpepsi- The long thing with many drivers that looks like it was stomped on, is a Polk SurroundBar with the grill off.

jcaut- The pics were resized to 1024x768 which reduced their size to a very manageable download. I used XP Image Resizer, which is a Microsoft Powertoy that can be found if you google it.

If anyone wants any high-res versions of those pics, lemme know and I can get them to you. All were taken with a 5mp camera.

[audiobliss]

YOU MEAN YOU GOT A POLK XRT12 XM TUNER FREE?!?!?!?!






Nice pics. Certainly looks like it'd be awesome to go one year.

[amulford]

I wasn't gonna take the camera....

[nadams]

I wasn't gonna take the camera....

:p :D

[nadams]

BTW- where was the I-Sonic? It wasn't until the drive home that I realised I didn't see ANY of them...

[amulford]

Neither did I, now that you mention it. Maybe they read the thread....It was pretty brutal :D

[nadams]

So was the SoundBar thread, but pretty much everyone was impressed w/ that... even if it still looks cheap.

[george daniel]

A big "TIP of the HAT" for the pictures, thanks !! :)

[brettw22]

BTW- where was the I-Sonic? It wasn't until the drive home that I realised I didn't see ANY of them...

There isn't a fully operational version of that item as of yet. They have several that do one of the functions (HDFM, DVD, XM, etc) but they have had some issues in getting them to all work in the same unit.

The release date for that has been pushed to next year until they iron out the bugs.

[dorokusai]

Please see below....

[dorokusai]

Wow....thanks for the pics.

I would love to have one of those freebie packs!!

Mike - I have a Large TShirt that I will send you for helping with the Model 9 transfer. Email me your addy....

dorokusai@comcast.net

[nadams]

There isn't a fully operational version of that item as of yet. They have several that do one of the functions (HDFM, DVD, XM, etc) but they have had some issues in getting them to all work in the same unit.

The release date for that has been pushed to next year until they iron out the bugs.

Yeah, I realise there isn't a FULLY operational one, but this being Polk HQ, I would've expected to see them in various stages of construction and destruction... maybe I just missed that room?

[beardog03]

I wonder if they intended for everything to be posted on the internet ?

after all it is HQ.. ;)

I`m sure they had to keep some company secrets