What the maker puts in writing
- “Time Lens technology aligns the drivers for better soundstaging and imaging”
- “1/2” silk dome tweeter and dual 2-1/2” Dynamic Balance(tm) mids/woofers”
- “Curved enclosure with high-gloss finish to match today’s flat-panel TVs”
- Description: “These Polk Audio speakers rely on patented Dynamic Balance to reduce distortion and add a Power Port for deeper, more efficient bass that blends effortlessly with a subwoofer”
- Description: “The silk-dome tweeter and mid-range drivers, paired with Time Lens technology, maintain smooth highs, superior audio detail and pinpoint imaging”
Eighty-nine millimeters is the argument
The shelf, by cabinet height:
89 mm — this · 132 mm — Yamaha · 140 mm — Dayton C40 · 147 mm — Goldwood PSC-43 · 155 mm — JBL · 175 mm — Micca OoO · 180 mm — both Micca MB42X-C · 194 mm — Klipsch · 216 mm — Neumitech · 220 mm — Sony · 245 mm — Goldwood AA35CB · 259 mm — Triangle
A center channel has to live in one of two awkward places: on the shelf under a television, where the screen’s lower edge and the stand’s feet set a hard ceiling, or on a wall beneath a mounted panel, where anything tall blocks the picture or the remote’s infrared receiver.
Eighty-nine millimeters — about three and a half inches — fits almost anywhere.
And the cabinet is shaped for the job: curved enclosure with high-gloss finish to match today’s flat-panel TVs.
The cost is the drivers, and it is real
A half-inch tweeter and two 2.5-inch woofers — both the smallest on this shelf.
Cone area goes as the square of the radius, so a pair of 2.5-inch drivers has about 36 percent of the area of a pair of 4-inch ones, and roughly 15 percent of a pair of 6.5-inch ones.
What that costs is output and reach in the lower midrange: the chest weight of a man’s voice, the body of an impact. Which is exactly what the description concedes:
A Power Port for deeper, more efficient bass that blends effortlessly with a subwoofer.
That is not a defect so much as a system requirement. In any properly configured surround setup the receiver’s bass management sends low frequencies from all channels to the subwoofer, so the center only needs midrange and treble. The honest point is that this speaker depends on that configuration, where the Klipsch at $149.99 with 5.25-inch woofers or the Triangle at $459 with 6.5-inch ones would not.
If you have 7.87 in (200 mm) of clearance, the Neumitech at $89.99 gives you 5-inch woofers for ten dollars more.
Time Lens, and the problem it addresses
Time Lens technology aligns the drivers for better soundstaging and imaging.
A woofer and a tweeter sit apart on the baffle, and their voice coils are at different depths, so sound from one has further to travel. The crossover itself shifts phase near the handover frequency as well.
Around that band both drivers are producing sound at once. If their contributions arrive out of step they partly cancel — leaving a dip in the response, and smearing the sharp leading edge of a transient.
On a center channel the stakes are higher, because the audience is spread sideways and the two woofers are too. At least four of the seventeen listings here address it:
This — Time Lens alignment
Dayton C40 and JBL 245C — a 2.5-way crossover, which stops both woofers covering the same midrange
Neumitech CS5 — “designed to minimize driver spacing, reducing the effects of off-axis lobing”, which names the problem outright
Nine listings do not mention it.
Dynamic Balance, briefly
Polk’s patented method, stated to “reduce distortion”. It is a driver design technique: the cone and surround are analyzed to find where resonances fall, and the materials and geometry are adjusted to move those resonances out of the band the driver is actually asked to cover.
The same name appears on Polk’s T15 and XT15 bookshelf speakers, so it is a range-wide approach rather than a feature of this model.
What is not published
No frequency response, no sensitivity, no impedance.
Sensitivity is the omission that costs most, because it decides what amplifier you need — every 3 dB being a doubling of power. Four products here publish it, spanning 95 dB (Klipsch) to 86 dB (Micca): a factor of eight.
No port direction. The listing names a “Power Port” without saying which way it fires — and on a center speaker that is the key question, because a rear port pushed into a cabinet is choked. Sony, JBL and Neumitech publish rear ports; Triangle alone publishes front-facing vents; the Goldwood AA35CB and Dayton C40 are sealed and do not care.
1,520 g is published — the lightest cabinet on this shelf, against 12,000 g for the JBL.
Prices quoted in this text were read on October 4, 2026. The live price is at the top of the page.
