We purchased the Polk T50 so that our expert reviewer could thoroughly test and review it. Read on for our full product review.

Good speakers can get very, very expensive. You can even buy a new car for the price of a pair of tower speakers! But Polk believes that everyone should have access to good sound, and so the Polk T50 tower speakers were born. For $300 ($150 per speaker), you get a big, booming sound that will bring your movies and music to life. These speakers are beefy beasts, with dual passive radiators under the bright woofer. Together with the tweeter, the sound is powerful, clean, and precise. These are the perfect tower speakers for someone just diving into the rich world of high-end audio.

The Polk T50 is a good size, standing 36 inches tall and weighing in at about twenty pounds. It looks a little bland, with a matte black veneer and a plastic coating, but it’s a mature-looking speaker that will fit nicely into most rooms. Build quality isn’t bad for a $150 speaker, with thin MDF all around and some nice sturdy woofers and tweeters. Unfortunately, the grille is a disaster; after two weeks of light use, it’s starting to crack badly, and two pieces of plastic have already fallen off. We wouldn’t recommend swapping it out more than necessary.

That said, it’s worth noting that this is the only part of the speaker that had quality issues. The tweeter is pretty nice, with a standard 1-inch silk dome design and a solid, fairly deep parabolic waveguide. Below that is a 6.25-inch extended-throw polymer composite driver and a pair of passive radiators. Essentially, the top driver is a full-fledged woofer, while the other two are decoupled and act as resilient diaphragms to extend the low-end frequency response. It’s an interesting design choice, and it makes the front-end look flashier than it would have if Polk had gone with rear ports instead of passive radiators.