Budget Polk SDA 2s
As I related here while doing my daily troll of FB Marketplace I stumbled across someone selling a "Polk Audio SDA Signature Reference System SRS 3.1 TL" speakers. I googled them and discovered the whole SDA rabbit hole which I promptly jumped into. Here is a bit about SDA.
SDA sounded cool and exotic and complicated and possibly really good-sounding. And being a tech-dude all of that appealed to me. The FBM example didn't look all that good in the pics and it was 3hr each way drive, so I kept looking. I pondered ordering something SDA off of ebay but shipping was atrociously expensive and the systems were pricey on EBay, too. But then somebody listed a "Polk SDA 2" for $140 "only" 2 hrs away. I reached out to him and 1) discovered he also had a set of Klipsch Tangent T500s (he didn't know the model, but I deduced it from the pics) for $240 to potentially upgrade my H2s at Office #2. And the real closer, he agreed to my proposal for him to meet me halfway for an additional $100. Yeah, I was taking a risk not listening to them, but at those prices, WTF?
So I drove home with two sets of BAS in the back of the Jeep. The T500s I quickly set up in Office #2 and they were good. I will indeed sell the H2s soon. The next weekend I hauled the SDA 2s over the mountain to house/office #1.
I found I had been a bit scammed. While dickering online with the seller I'd asked him if he had and was including the interface cable. He said yes. While we were transferring stuff at deal time, I asked about the cable, and he handed me a quite pristine long black cable, which I tossed in the back of the Jeep.
It was an Amazon Basics 15-foot optical cable! And he'd disappeared from FB. Also the near-virgin (it actually was!) ADCOM GFA 555 200 WPC power amp I'd ordered from eBay for the SDA 2s was delayed a day when an 18-wheeler (fortunately not the UPS truck) caught fire and blocked the only road into our region for several hours.
So I lost the day that I had dedicated on my calendar for setting up and experimenting with the the SDA 2. And I didn't have the interconnect cable. Double damn!
The next day in a 2 hour window I found, I set up the SDA 2s and the ADCOM with a Wiim Pro Plus as the source and discovered the left speaker wasn't working. Dang.
Anyway the next day we were leaving for a week's trip.
When I got back to Office #1 I'd set aside considerable time to debug/fix the left SDA 2 speaker. As there was no sound at all, I figured the most likely scenario was that there was a broken connection somewhere. I imagined spending a fair bit of time going from connection to connection with the electrical meter until I found the problem.
I removed the post plate first, hoping it was something as simple as a bad connection there. I was running a low-power audio signal into the posts for detection purposes before I removed the screws holding the post plate. Seldom does debugging electronics go so well, but miraculously, as soon as I'd pulled the rather hairballish-looking plug of wiring out of the cabinet, I started getting sound from the left speaker!!!!!!
I did some balance checks and the left side sounded fine! I very carefully reinserted the wiring back into the cabinet and rescrewed the post plate and sure enough it continued to work. Some days you get lucky.
I fired that sucker up. Even without the interconnect cable, they sounded fantastic. Better than any of my systems other than the B&W 702 S2 system. Now I really wanted to find a cable!
I quickly found a cable for sale on Ebay for $30. That was a relief.
It took awhile to ship, so alas, we had to go over to house/office #2 (Klipsch Heresies and Tangent T500) for an extended stay before the cable arrived. We came over to House/Office #1 today for the day and the cable had arrived.
I played my reference list of tracks without the cable, then installed the cable. Still sounded good. Great full bass.
Wow! AFter the SDA cable was installed connecting the speakers the sound stage hugely popped. Like, I've never heard before on an audio system. I'd remained suspicious of the left speaker, so I was regularly checking that it was still working. Amazingly, once the SDA cable was connected, I could NOT tell if the left (or for that matter the right) speaker was working. It all merged into an essentially speaker-free single audio sound stage hanging there.
So a long journey but in the end success. I'm now rocking what sure seems to be real SDA sound for $140 plus $30 for the replacement cable.
Posted Jul 21, 2024, 4:02 PM UTC