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Engines revving. Drivers scheming. A grandstand and infield abuzz with race day bustle. Rob Limbaugh, then a vice president at Polk Audio, a Baltimore-based speaker manufacturer, soaked it all in as he wandered through the pit crews at the 24 Hours of Daytona endurance sports car race.

The partnership between Polk Audio and MOMO has been in the forefront of adding sharp styling to quality speakers and subwoofers.

As he passed near a Ferrari sponsored by Italian accessories specialist MOMO Design, Limbaugh paused to talk with a tire changer on the pit team. After some banter, Limbaugh learned that the man under the grimy garb was none other than the U.S. sales manager for MOMO's racing division.

And a bell went off in Limbaugh's head. MOMO — of course! What better partner for Polk's new line of performance-oriented speakers than a company renowned for quality and industrial design.


DiComo on MOMO
Paul DiComo is chuckling as he relates this story. The marketing manager at Polk Audio has good reason to do so. DiComo waves his hand at the stacks of Polk/MOMO boxes piled high at Polk headquarters. New coaxial speakers. New and improved subwoofers. A totally new line of amplifiers, a bit of a leap of faith, since Polk has proudly touted itself as "The Speaker Specialists" since its founding in 1972.

With dozens of new products introduced in the last few months, many of them associated with the Polk/MOMO series, the low-profile Polk headquarters in a suburban Baltimore industrial park has been as much a beehive of activity as pit row at Daytona.

And a change in the way Polk approaches car audio is attributable to the idle chitchat in that Ferrari pit — and the subsequent marriage of exceptional sound and innovative styling.

"The basket on the first Polk/MOMO subs looked like the MOMO Quasar 2 wheel," DiComo said. "It was the first time anybody had done anything to tie in speaker design to wheel design. Now it's all the rage. I think with MOMO, we started something."

Polk/MOMO speakers have helped to change the way car audio is perceived, but they've also changed the way Polk does business.

Within the last year, Polk has discarded its entry-level business — and even speakers that might be considered a step above "Car Audio 101" in favor of the Polk/MOMO and db Series.

Goodbye, GNX subwoofers. Farewell, EX3 Series loudspeakers. Adios, GNR speakers and subs.

Even though those lines were priced affordably and performing well, they seemed inconsistent with what Polk was hearing from customers and dealers in its most massive ?listening campaign" to date.

The Polk/MOMO line includes both component subwoofers and enclosed subwoofers.

"Did we have some time and money tied up in those [entry-level lines]?" DiComo asked rhetorically. "Absolutely. But Polk has never been known as an entry-level brand. We've always been a step-up brand without being ridiculously overpriced."

Or, as Mark Suskind, product line manager at Polk, put it: "You give us a little more, and we'll give you a lot more in return."

To set a course for 2003, Al Ballard, Polk's vice president of marketing, took a course in conducting focus groups, loaded up on videotape and clean clothes, and traveled across the country to meet with dealers, floor salesmen, consumers, installers, and just about anyone who had a passing relationship with Polk products.

The result was about 40 hours of videotaped focus groups that weighed the pros and cons of Polk product offerings, and a paradigm shift within the company's car audio sector.

Suskind, who was present at many of the sessions, said he actually put different drawings and cone materials in front of participants to get first-hand opinions.

"I think it says a lot that we went out in the field and listened to our customers because we're focused on meeting our customers' needs," he said.

Within the last year, the hard sell of the MOMO line also included a commitment to the show car circuit. Polk executives regularly attend Hot Import Nights and other "tuner-style" events, and a set of custom installers rolls out Polk/MOMO show cars in the back of the Baltimore facility.

The newest car — a Honda Civic purchased at a Baltimore lot — will be outfitted with 6-15" Polk/MOMO woofers in the trunk and a pair of 8" woofers in the front.

Polk's latest show car, a Honda Civic, will feature Polk/MOMO woofers through the vehicle.

In other words, a whole lot of bass — but an installation that still seems realistic to a show-goer who wants ideas and tips for his own vehicle.

While Limbaugh's chance encounter at Daytona sparked the Polk/MOMO partnership, the vision of a final product spent months on a drawing board that crisscrossed the Atlantic Ocean between Baltimore and MOMO's headquarters in Milan, Italy.

Polk's commitment to accurate sonic reproduction was a given — the company is well known for its award-winning home and car speakers. The issue, then, was whether MOMO could dress up speakers that sounded great, but looked, by DiComo's admission, "a bit on the stodgy side."

"We didn't know what was possible, and neither did MOMO," Suskind said. "We handled the application and the engineering side first, and then we went to them and said, ?O.K., what can you do on your part to put your ID on it?' "

The "ID" was apparent when the first Polk/MOMO component speakers and subwoofers hit the streets four years ago. In addition to the Quasar 2 wheel look on the diamond-polished basket, the subwoofer featured a red ABS dustcap that added structural rigidity and cool looks.

Instead of an encompassing shroud-like grille, the component speakers came with billet-style grilles, unheard of at the time, but now a standard in the world of car speaker manufacturing.

While the MOMO line fared well initially, it really took off as the import tuner and custom car market exploded worldwide in the last three years. Piggybacking on that phenomenon has put Polk/MOMO products in front of a new audience.

"With car enthusiasts, cosmetics do count a lot," DiComo said. "The tuner market has just exploded. It's a major cultural force. It's a major lifestyle force. And these are people who are exposed to our products because they are familiar with MOMO, not necessarily because they are familiar with different car audio brands."

While MOMO continues to refine the look, Polk is searching for ways to improve sound quality by subjecting speakers to harsh proving grounds like a tone burst test, which takes woofers to their limits — and beyond — in a specially designed testing chamber.

Polk Audio's tone burst testing center examines the peak output of various woofers.

A laser-based test examines the performance of the woofer during its excursion. That way, Polk's engineers can determine the exact point at which the voice coil should be centered to guarantee less distortion and optimum output.

Perhaps the biggest recent change has come in the introduction of carbon fiber cones in the 2003 Polk/MOMO coaxial speakers, and the new Polk db Series, a step-up line that incorporates some of the same breakthroughs from the MOMO speakers.

Suskind said carbon fiber is more acoustically inert than the polypropylene blends used in previous generations of speakers. "It doesn't crack at the upper frequencies like poly, so it's ideal for coaxials," he said.

With about 120 employees in the Baltimore headquarters — most of the production is handled in the Far East — executives at Polk see the company as small enough to respond quickly to changing market conditions or innovative ideas like the partnership with MOMO.

"We can be nimble and I think that's a real advantage," DiComo said. Fewer employees and less bureaucracy means fewer corporate "hoops" to jump through when new ideas and new proposals arise.

"I think we can be closer to the marketplace when things are happening in the street. If your decision makers are 20 levels above the street, it gets filtered by the other 19 levels," he said.

Concentrating on speakers — despite the introduction of a series of amplifiers — also is a plus for Polk's business. DiComo believes that speaker-oriented companies generally manufacture the "best-sounding" car speakers. Companies that have diversified into receivers, mobile video, and other car audio products are unable to focus as much on the core issues of speaker research and design, he said.

"Keeping our focus helps us make better products. I really believe that," he said. "We test all our competitors' products and it just seems that the ?electronics guys' might sell a lot of product, but the listening experience is not the same."

Polk's home and car divisions freely swap ideas and information — the Polk/MOMO car amplifiers draw on the engineering experience associated with home powered subwoofers and home theater systems. Even then, though, DiComo said specialization is essential.

"The mindset for car and home is really, really different," he said. "If there's a question about the midrange, it might be really important for the home, but not in the car ? you're not going to be listening to a lot of classical music in the car. Power handling is much more important in the car than in home.

It's only a few hundred feet from the original cabinet speaker upon which Matthew Polk founded his company to a stack of first-generation Polk/MOMO amplifiers.

But, in fact, it has been a long, evolutionary trip.

Polk has entered the electronics area for the first time with Polk/MOMO amplifiers, introduced in late summer 2003.

Polk is breaking from its speaker background to offer a line of amplifiers with the Polk/MOMO label.

Though they are a break from "The Speaker Specialist" slogan, the MM Carbon Series amps fit into the changing car audio market. Many of the customers that Polk has picked up through the MOMO line seem to want a "unified" look in the trunk, DiComo said — again, cosmetics and sound have to go hand-in-hand.

"There's brand loyalty out there, and they like having the woofer and amp match," he said.

So the Polk/MOMO amps come with a MOMO-suggested hideaway cover plate that conceals the wiring muss for a clean look. From a sound quality standpoint, they feature a "Pre-EQ" switch that provides specific crossover and EQ settings to work seamlessly with Polk/MOMO speakers.

And there's a common sense side to the amplifier equation, DiComo noted. When you buy a subwoofer, you probably need an amplifier to power it. "That's why we consider complementing our speaker efforts," he said.

It might be several years before the refrain, "Oh, I didn't know Polk makes amps" dies down, DiComo acknowledged.

But he said he is regularly quizzed about a series of print ads that show founder Matthew Polk in a white lab coat — even though those advertisements have been on the shelf for more than a decade.

"So, the moral is — it's a long process," he laughed.


Steven Johnson writes about A/V gear for Crutchfield.