This is an overview of the Polk Reserve speakers for home audio and home theater. When Matthew Polk introduced the Polk Monitor 10 to the world in 1972, he really shook things up with the amount of performance it offered for the money. Matthew and his engineering team had taken everything they had learned from making some pretty serious speakers designed for large live concerts and they put it into a new home speaker that went on to become one of the best-selling speakers of all time.

In 2019, Polk set out to produce a line of speakers called their Legend series that paid homage to those original classic Polk speakers from the ’70s and ’80s. Polk developed a new tweeter, midrange/woofer cone material, and a new bass port for the new Legend series.

The Reserve series makes us think back to those early Polk 10’s in that Polk is putting almost all of the tech they engineered for the Legend speakers into the Reserve at a much lower price point. Reserve replaces the very popular RTiA line that was introduced in 2007. The Reserve lineup has about as much trickle-down technology as we have ever seen from a speaker manufacturer. They are quite the value for the money offering music and home theater enthusiasts a great selection of very affordable speakers that perform way beyond their cost.

You’ll be able to put together many different combinations of perfectly matched home theater speaker systems with Reserve. There are three towers, two bookshelf models, two center channels, an on-wall model, and a set of flexible Atmos speakers that can be placed either on top of the speakers or mounted on the wall.

Because they share so much technology, we will first go over what is common to them all, then get into the differences you’ll find as you go from model to model.

Features & Technologies Shared Across the Series

Reserve Series Model Comparison

Polk Reserve R100 Compact Bookshelf Speakers

This is the entry bookshelf speaker using the Pinnacle Ring Radiator Tweeter and a 5 ¼” Turbine cone bass driver. These are relatively small, being about 13” tall and 6 ½” wide. They do have the X-Port on the rear, so you will want them to be a little bit away from the back wall. Interestingly, they still have a key-hole slot to hang them on a wall. We think you would only want to do this where they were used with a subwoofer and crossed over pretty high to prevent the wall from blocking the port. But this would be a great application to hang them on the sidewalls for your primary surround speakers.

Polk Reserve R200 Bookshelf Speakers

Polk Reserve R500 Compact Floorstanding Speaker

Polk Reserve R600 Floorstanding Loudspeaker

Now we start to get into some tower models that make the most sense. These have a totally different bass port technology for tighter and more impactful deep bass.

Polk Reserve R700 Premium Stereo Floorstanding Loudspeaker

The R700 is the only tower that is a true three-way design. As you might have guessed, it has the same tweeter as all the others, but with a 6 ½” Turbine cone midrange coupled with dual 8” polypropylene woofers.

Overall Recommendation

In listening to these, we believe they are a great choice for music lovers who want a good product in this price range but don’t want to pay for bells and whistles that they won’t use. As we mentioned, these speakers don’t allow for bi-wiring, but in this price range, we think Polk’s strategy of putting every dollar into performance is the right choice. The one thing about all of these we do need to point out is the need for some decent power. None of the models are particularly sensitive and you will be best off for any of them if you can use a home theater receiver or stereo amp that has good current capabilities. Then they will really come to life!