Rock Outside...without rocks

It seems like your only choices for outside speakers are bland white boxes, rocks, and tree stumps. Now I'm not dendrophobic, but even the best of these don't really look like tree stumps.

With the Sat30 and Sub10, Polk has made some speakers designed to blend a little more naturally, if less "organically."

Your first question might be, what maniac reviews outdoor speakers in December? Well, it's 66 degrees outside, which sure beats the temp in the summer, which can feel like double that. Summer is when we retreat inside.

The Sat30 is about the size of a small light fixture, which is not by accident. One of the installation options is to hang the speakers from the patio roof as if they are light fixtures. Inside is a 3.5-inch "Dynamic Balance Composite Cone" midrange. In front of that is a 0.75-inch "Dynamic Balance Polyurethane Tweeter," a layout reminiscent of car speakers. The frequency response of the satellites is a claimed 100 Hz to 22 kHz. These sats are "weatherproof." Polk says their design was tested down to -40 F and up to 185 F. It's never reached that hot here in the summer, as far as I know.

The Sub10 does a pretty convincing job of looking like a ceramic planter, or at least the base of a ceramic planter. Again, by design. Inside you've got a 10-inch "Dynamic Balance Composite Driver" with dual voice coils. These dual coils are powered by separate connections to your receiver/amp.

Because the Sub10 is passive, you'll be hooking it up to the same speaker terminals as the Sat30s, that is unless you have lots of extra channels on your amp. This results in a 4 ohm load on the receiver/amp (each sat and each "channel" of the sub are 8 ohms). This shouldn't be a problem for pretty much any modern amp or receiver, though you should read your instruction manual to be sure.

Installation was easy, regardless of how you want to install them. I chose the most time consuming; actually mounting them to some joists in my covered patio. The speakers came with a template for the pilot holes, and there were only two screws per satellite.

Alternately, as I mentioned earlier, you can hang the sats like the light fixtures their design mimics. Or, you can attach them to the included spike and stick them in your yard. They're also paintable.

What makes reviewing outdoor speakers of any variety a challenge is that the sound is going to vary depending on how and where you install them. For example, if you choose to hang them, the high frequencies are going to suffer if you're not sitting pretty close to under them. If you mount them to a wall, you may get a bump in the upper-bass frequencies (though often this is a benefit given the wide open spaces they'll be trying to fill).

I installed them on a joist in a semi-enclosed patio up near the roof. The sub was in a corner in the same area. I chose to run the speaker wires to the sub, and then just have one pair or wires running to my amp. You could also run pairs of wires from each speaker, and the two from the sub, to their own amp channels, or wire them together at the stereo speaker terminals on a receiver.

As you'd expect, the Sat30's sound best when you're more or less in a direct line with the tweeter.

That said, the high frequency drop-off isn’t too bad, so even if you’re sitting away from their main direction, you still get a decent amount of high end. The tweeter is impressively good, delivering detailed highs without sounding harsh or gritty, which is what I've heard in many outdoor speakers.

There is a gap, like with all sub/sat systems, between the lowest notes the sats can provide and the highest that the sub can produce. This lower-midrange/upper-bass area is pretty absent, but I can't imagine anyone is doing critical listening on their porch, so I'm probably just nit picking.
 
Bass is good, though is benefitted/harmed by placement. I placed the unit in the corner, which gave a nice boost to the bass, though it was almost too much. At least, standing in the patio area it was. Out further in the yard, it blended better with the sats.

One of the tracks I found that showed off the Sat30/Sub10's strengths was "Love" from Air's latest album Love 2. The bass came through strong, and the synths, vocals and percussion filled the space at all volumes.

My advice, if you pick up a set of these speakers, is to experiment with placement of the sub and sats before you mount anything. There are plenty of options, and a bit of adjustment beforehand will probably pay off in much better sound quality in the long run.

The Sat30/Sub10 combo is a well designed and unobtrusive alternative to the bland white boxes or herbologically based alternatives. The sound is better than you'd expect from such inexpensive speakers and will definitely supply you with quality outdoor music, no matter what the weather.

Ok, off to annoy the neighbors (some more...).

PRICE:
Sat30: $149.95
Sub10: $299.95

CONTACT: polkaudio.com