Thank you Bengt,
I appreciate that. We selected an acoustically transparent mesh that has a metallic weave in it and is a dark grey which sheen vs the typical matter black. I wanted to do that to visually lighten it up a touch and really show off those chamfers. This chamfers are very intentional. When I was at Sound United I had a rule for engineering that no sounder could be taller than 2". The trend in TV stands was bringing them lower combined with the slimmer bezels makes the available envelope to work with much more difficult. Pill shaped drivers needed to be developed, different types of arrays. Eventually we were able to get great sound out of something only 1.75" tall, but that of course added cost and all of those sounders were more expensive.
This product is the first Polk sounder under $150. We wanted to do something to go right at the meat of the market and make something that sounded great, looked more high end, and had some patented features that are really helpful like Voice Adjust. That meant we had to go above my 2" regulation. So the purpose of those large chamfered surfaces it to visually trisect the height of the bar. The sides have no vertical surfaces for that reason as well, and even the logo placed off to the right doesn’t allow you to visually bisect the width.
I’m happy with the result. When we started this project I was concerned that we would sacrifice design for performance and value, but I feel the hard work netted a pretty balanced solution.