Always nice to see some new stuff and read up about it!
The review was glowing indeed, but i think that the reviewer needs to test more speakers. a spike in distortion in at frequencies as critical as 400-800Hz hardly deserves a score of 9.9? cough....seas...cough...lotus...cough...excel...cough...nextel...cough
I read up the white paper on that speaker from the polkaudio website. its a good read, just like the reviewer says. I tried to find differences between the tweeter used in the polk set and the alpine spx-177r. They appear identical, same faraday ring, same size, shape, grill design, just a little different cosmetically. Its nice to see that this tiny little alpine/polk tweet is less than 1% distortion from the crossover point of approx 4KHz onwards though, not to mention the killer off axis response...there arent any objective measurements of that tweeter up till now and this is the first i've seen...from my experience with it i always felt the alpine spx-177r tweet aka vifa mini ring radiator was pretty much as good as small domes got, and this kind of proves it, provided he didnt fudge the measurements.
The mid doesnt appeal to me that much though. I like the BL, i'm so-so on the FR, but i dont like the distortion. for a car audio speaker, its probably much better than the typical run of the mill stuff like focal polykevlars/utopias and the dynaudios but maybe higher quality DIY drivers like the ones we see here and are used to have spoiled us a little too much? I personally think you could do better by using a Peerless HDS Exclusive 7 incher, or the SEAS W18NX (both better than the polk mid) and combine these mids with the Alpine SPX-177r (probably identical to the polk tweet) and there you go. better performance for less than half the price? 2 nextel mids ($300) and the entire spx-177r set ($215 from ikesound?) will cost you 500 bucks. thats still 300 less than the polk and you still have an extra pair of vifa XG18 midbasses! (think of it as compensation for not getting the polk crossovers, fair trade).The cost difference widens a lot more with the Exclusive 7 incher. With those its like about $450 in savings right???
I guess as 'commercia car audio speakers' go, these are probably da shiznit. But still a long way from impressing the DIY crowd. I think polk deserve a pat on the back for bringing mainstream car audio speakers to another level the way SEAS Lotus did though.
Just my thoughts
Edit: After i saw npdang's post, and remembered zaph's test of the XG18 mid (very low midrange distortion) which is used in the alpine SPX-177r set, i suddenly realise that the spx-177r is already a match (even better it seems) than the polk component set. You dont even have to use a different mid. 215 bucks , a quarter of the price, and you have already matched the polk set...and the alpine is a commercial component speaker