He works for who know???

[wangotango68]

I was reading the sony es ss-m9ed speaker review in the august
stereophile mag. they said the speaker was designed by "ex polk engineer" Dan Anagnos. if any of the polk guys see this can you tell me what speakers he designed while he was at polk? just curious.

scott

[rskarvan]

I've read that the Monitor 10's were designed by a Mr. Sandy Gross who went on to found Definitive Technologies. True?
Curious. What other classic Polk's did Sandy Gross design?

Please post any tech information regarding the Monitor 10 series 2 (circa 1991). Freq response? Watts? Ohms? etc. I haven't found ANY tech info on these classics.

Does Polk have a problem holding onto good technical talent?

["Polk" Paul DiComo]

Interesting questions.
First, Dan Anagnos did work for Polk as an engineer many years ago (7 yrs ago or so?) and to the best of my poor memory I believe he designed the MM100 which was the first Polk car woofer and I think he did the C4 subwoofer too. I'm sure he worked on several other projects but I can't remember which ones. Dan has a very good ear and he's done some nice work for Sony. We're very happy to see one of our family do well.

Very rarely is one engineer soley responsible for a given speaker design. Teams of people design and develop speakers at Polk. At least it has been that way for the past dozen years or so. In the early days Matt did it all single handed. But today speaker development has become complex to require the talents of many people.

As for Sandy Gross, he was VP of Marketing in the early years and did conceptualize speaker designs but is not an engineer. The conceptionalization process did (and still does) go something like this: Marketing guy says "I think the customers want a slender florstanding speaker about 3 feet tall for home theater use so it has to be shielded and play really loud and I want it to sell for $99 and it needs to be in stock in three weeks." The product development team then says "You're out of your mind." or words to that effect but sometimes a little ruder. The team then works realy hard for months and brings out something that the marketing folks can live with.

As far as Polk holding on to technical talent, sometimes people leave companies for various reasons - more money, more responsibility, life changes, etc. We can't hold on to everyone but we have one of the most stable staffs in the audio business. Many of our key employees have been here for ten years or more. Our Engineering VP, Stu, has been here over 20 years. I have been here over 18. Our main acoustical engineer has been here nearly 10 years. That's very rare in this business. Even more rare is that our founders Matt and George are still here leading us after nearly 30 years.