JBL Studio 530 vs Polk R200

These things make a wonderful sound in a way that others just can't seem to produce and is just hard to explain. The other most important thing to me at least, is that they produced absolutely zero listening fatigue.

If you have them aimed right at you, you are in heaven and this works great for me as I want to listen without disturbing others. However I could see this being problematic in home theater applications where you have more than one listener spread out in multiple seating locations. Used in a larger home theater they might work but in a small one the sound field will be too narrow (within 20 degrees of center) to cover all seating positions. This unfortunately may mean the the whole Polk Reference range may not be the best choice for small home theaters with more than one seating position

This was about a year ago. I'm only up to the E's so far, but oh what a pleasure to be immersed in the glorious sound emanating forth from these wondrous horn-loaded speakers! I've been driving them with both solid state as well as tubed amplification (I change back and forth from time to time as an obsessed audiophile), and the sound is truly high-end. Timbral accuracy, detail, sound attack and decay, well balanced, tight bass, air.

I feel this speaker would definitely enjoy a high quality amp and so use it with a high quality class D or a class AB amp (50w/channel or higher). I have the LSiM 702 surrounds in my home theater and always loved its sound signature and was very excited when Polk released these at a lower price point than LSiM 703. The sound signature is very similar between the LSiM and Reserve with a smidge more detail retrieval in the Reserve. Makes me wonder why the LSiM didn't get the same attention as the Reserves