Polk Heritage Collection

The link below is to the tech brief on the Woodbourne. Details all of what is going on inside. The grille cloth is slightly off white.

http://www.polkaudio.com/downloads/tech-briefs/WoodbourneTechBrief_01.pdf

Nice, you guys should download the app and play around with it. Quinn, are you going to CES?

Having followed your move from frog to Polk, I have been awaiting this post as I have been at a very similiar situation.
I can imagine it has been a wild ride to come to these results looking at their other “off the shelves” gear.

3 things to get right away from my chest:

  1. I am missing an overall design-link through the complete family product line (details, formal language etc. besides the vineer inserts)

  2. Packaging design / POS from the 80s, looking like sold in the 80s (edges on the packaging of the woodbourne worn off, yellowish packaging color of the muji-like player).
    In my opinion the packaging is killing right now all efforts to sell the product.
    (http://boards.core77.com/download/file.php?id=19216&mode=view)

  3. Why the use of different vineer styles on the same photograph? (cold/warm colors vs 50s design vineer)

and lastly:

how does this design/specs relate to an x-box gamer (wooden feet? curious to see that user/persona mood board, 40+ gamers?)
http://www.polkaudio.com/products/n1

Okay so Kudo’s to you and your team Micheal for the polk woodbourne. I have mine and love it hands down, there are only minor things that i would change but i have a feeling that they are the way they are due to constraints.

My one question though and this is something that i see as a missed opportunity, what happened with the remote? I do enjoy the simplistic and elegant form but over all it has a feeling of disconnected with the rest of the unit.

Material - all plastic
Color - brown with out the richness of the wood that is on the main unit - and a Off white that looks out of place next to the virgin white on the main unit.

But because i do love the it my next questions is this - of the Polk family what product do you recommend for my office which is a closed in space of aprox, 12’ x 18’ im looking for something that doesn’t need to blow the doors off but i can use when not in the mood to put my head phones on. (which may be replaced with a pair of yours)

Good catch Chevis. Originally we had a grille that was more off white, but we switched to the whiter grille cloth based on the initial sample, but the remotes were already shot. Soft touch plastic is an upgrade for the typical membrane switch remotes that come with these products, if it was wood, the product retail would have done up quite a bit.

I do have something to recommend for your office, but I can’t tell you about it until CES :wink:

In the mean time, if you wanted something from our premium brand Definitive, we just launched these. Machined aluminum bases, bi-polar sonics, super loud and the sonic reproduction is amazing. The Definitive voicing is a little more of true to studio sound, so it sounds a little crisper and colder than the Polk sound.

Cameron Nielsen, who also posts on here quite a bit, worked on these along with Luke Saule from frog.



You could also get the Camden Sq, it has an Aux in in addition to BlueTooth.
http://www.polkaudio.com/products/camdensquare
747192124106.jpg

Excellent work.

The Nue Voe is awesome: beautiful organic shape, the tortoiseshell plus metallic brand id strip is classy. Several companies are making earbuds as jewelry, customizable even, which I think is a proper embodiment of designing for women, unlike some of the examples discussed in other thread.

I take exception to the Camden square design. In audio world the Apple popularized slab-brick with radiused corners is so overdone as to be creatively bankrupt or outright copying. You want a list of 20 - 30 companies making various audio equipment with this design style? Awhile ago I was commissioned to write article during Apple-Samsung lawsuit and I chose this topic, the gross overuse unto exact copying of Macmini design style (not published, magazine decided otherwise). Of course, Apple doesn’t own this style, the first to use this shape in audio was Werner Panton in 1963.

Pier, I’m a bit biased, but I am honestly surprised you’re having trouble seeing all the originality in the Camden Square. What other wireless speaker has a contoured metal grille with unique record groove perf, and on top of that metal grilles on the sides along with leather and rivets? This is worlds apart from the Mac Mini form factor or any wireless speaker I’ve seen recently.

I think it is one of those things you just need to see in person.

The bell curve dome of the grille reads a lot more in person as does the brown leather and gold metallic.

Thanks for the props Pier. I am particularly proud of that Nue era. It just feels good.

Hi Cameron, Yo

First, I want to be clear that I am not critiquing the Camden product design details, the colour, materials and finish, they are quite fine and expressive of its audio purpose. Also, leather is occasionally used in high end audio for its mythical acoustic attenuation properties, some speaker front baffles are leather wrapped, it’s a bit unusual in packaged electronics and the design team has done a good job with it here.

To be clear, leather sides, speakers on the side, perforated record groove, are not form factor, they are design details and CMF. The geometric shape of a square with radiused corners is the form factor and this is what I am critiquing as overdone referencing the Macmini and Verner Panton’s 1963 Wega. I can show 31 images of different, small, desktop audio products with this identical form factor, 32 now with the Camden, most with different design details (knobs, led’s, venting, reveals, and CMF), only one with speakers on the side, raised top detail (here, a bit bland design).

Why 32 different products, all audio packaged electronics, with identical form factor, released within last 3 years? It poses a design conundrum, and why I’m pursuing this answer in this thread. Probably, all 32 are a good embodiment of form - function - cost, properly sized for their use. But it is similar argument Apple made against Samsung’s design copying, citing Nokia as good alternate, about phone design: when design requirements are really stripped down to an obvious proscripted form factor there are still design options to create something new and unique. In Camden + 31 others’ case, the form factor is not exactly proscripted like a smart phone, it was a design teams’ choice and it’s overdone.

Looks like that was one hell of a tedious job to model that hole pattern on that grill and I assume there were many iterations of it before ending on that! :smiley:

Nice to see the iterations of the ear buds too. Thanks for sharing, awesome work!

I also find it funny that we see this same form factor in the new Nest Protect. Which was released around the same time, at least within a few months. Although meant for a completely different market. It still carries the same general form factor. A rounded square with subtle bell curve top surface with a patterned grill.

I always wondered if the same inspiration and trench research done at that time helped the design team come up with a similar concept. I’m sure there are lots of other examples of similar things happening in the design world. But being on the design side of one (the nest protect) Im curious if the designers of the Canden ran into the same issues and feedback that we did on the Nest and if the design team explored the same alternatives too.

The more I think of it, the more interesting it becomes to think that theres a sketch in my notebook right now. That in X amount of time will show up as product in the real world. And all I can think of is, if only X client would have seen it, they could have been first to the punch.

Cameron just posted this in the newly released work section. Just debuted at CES:

Not in the warehouse just yet, but here are the specs:
http://www.polkaudio.com/products/hampden

was digging through some old files and found a bunch of the early sketches from this series:



Excellent work friend, good job

Hello all, Merry Christmas!

Probably not the right thread but saw this on a favourite blog of mine.

A nice all round blog I think, but with some focus to the female form is certainly not safe for work!

Nice. Thanks for posting that Sam. That was the N1 soundbar, which was done right after the heritage collection and carried a bit of the vibe of it. Especially in the white color way.

It also used this cool technology called SDA that our engineers developed that cancels inter-aurel cross-talk… Basically fools your brim into think there is surround sound.



Thanks for the extra views, I like the interface integral to the horizontal fins.

It also reminds me of the Hadid BMW facility!

Thanks Sam. That interface is a series of living hinges that continue back under that top trim panel and is actually all one piece. It is a pretty neat little piece of design and engineering. Under the keys is a row of LEDs to show volume and they animate to show different sound profiles.