Hmmm. Interesting thread. Forty-five pages of missives prompted by ownership of Zu Definition 4 loudspeakers, that reveal the full scope of dysfunctions in the realm of hi-fi.
I have two completely separate Zu-based systems in my house. One is built about Zu Definition 4, the other now built around Zu Druid 6. I've had Zu speakers exclusively for 14 years and counting. The Definition-based system started with the 1st generation. I upgraded to Definition 2, and then to Definition 4, which has been stable, other than a cap upgrade to the supertweeter's high pass filter, for eight years thus far. I can now see the next Zu Definition on the horizon. The Druid-based system began with a 1st-generation pair that had been factory upgraded to "v2.5" status when I bought them used. That pair saw a series of impromptu improvements whenever Sean Casey visited Los Angeles, culminating in the final version for that 1st gen cabinet, Druid Mk 4-08. When Druid 5 became available they were installed here. And now Druid 6.
Similarly, I have been using Audion SET and PSET power amplification most of this span.
I'm amused to see people write an opinion venturing that Zu Definitions aren't suitable for listening to classical/orchestral/symphonic music. I consider the Definition series one of the few speakers that renders classical music faithfully. I chortle when I read commentary that Definition 4 is a "rough" speaker. Properly setup and driven, it is one of the smoothest in octave-to-octave balance and behavior consistency. I look cockeyed at claims that Definitions lack transparency.
I have been spending my own money on hifi since 1968, and did some tenure in high-end audio retail. I retain relationships in the hifi economy that give me listening access to most of what's available today and what has been available over the last 50 years. That's just context for things I write next.
Zu speakers take some getting accustomed to for many people. If you're like me, you get it within 3 minutes. Some people require 3 days, or 3 weeks, or 3 months. Or 3 years. Some people never get it. What's the reason for the assimilation period? Because from the lowest mid-fi to the highest of the high end, most people have been listening to music presented "wrong." And they think it's normal. There's hi-fi sound and then there's what music played on real instruments in real acoustic spaces and no electronic sound reinforcement sounds like. There are many culprits, but the single most assertive contributor to the bastardizing of music through hifi is crossovers in speakers. The phase anomalies resulting, the tonal thinning and dynamic choking at the crossover points, and the uneven dynamic and transient characteristics imposed by multiple, narrow-purpose, drivers creates a sound hifi consumers have come to hear as normal. But it's not natural. I'll give you a little more context, particularly relevant to the classical music issue and Zu. I grew up an hour west of Philadelphia. From 3rd grade through the end of high school, I attended Philadelphia Orchestra concerts -- Eugene Ormandy was still conducting and serving as music director. In college, I had the Pittsburgh Symphony nearby. In graduate school I had the Boston Symphony and Symphony Hall, which continued through the ten years I lived in the Boston area through throughout the 80s, and maintained a share of a pair of season tickets. I grew up with classical music, great orchestras and good-to-great halls. Until Zu Definitions, I did not listen to classical music very often on stereo systems because no matter how much power and dynamic range a system had, the presentation and tonality was entirely wrong on modern speakers.
The typical high-end speaker measures well but sounds incoherent. We used to accept this because full-range or nearly-full range speakers simply did not sound tonally authentic, or dynamically authentic, in sizes that can be sensibly used domestically. Like everyone else, I had to own and listen to crossover-based speakers for most of my time spending money in this interest, so I generally looked for the simplest. I had two early revelations about the evils of crossovers and multi-drivers speakers. One was on hearing the Quad ESL(57) for the first time in 1970. Yes, it has crossovers. But the Quad ESL crossover uses mostly simple resistors working with the intrinsic capacitance of the panels to yield a 1st order slope, and the panels are by design, materials and characteristics the same. Dynamic range was limited, and the Quad ESL is quite directional. But within its dynamic limits and the listening position the design allows, coherence was not only striking but the speaker created a "lens of authenticity" not found anywhere else at the time, other than the KLH Nine. I have owned both of these in the past. The second revelation about coherence came a few years later when I was in college. There was a Jensen speaker factory nearby. I was working in one of the early true high-end audio emporiums at the birth of what we now call high-end, and had a customer who was an engineer at the Rola-Jenson factory. Their main output was automotive speakers. One day he brought in a speaker he built. It was a personal project, so just a structural prototype, rough-looking but functionally complete. It used a single Jensen 6x9" full range car stereo speaker with whizzer cone, on a very broad, square baffle and a folded vent structure. Consider it cheap, cheerful, and *early* iteration of what we see today in the Voxativ Ampeggio Due. Without the gloss black paint and painstaking craftsmanship! This was 1975. He wanted to put it up against our Dahlquists, Quads, Magneplanar Tympani III-A, etc. So we wired it up to an Audio Research Dual 76a and let 'er rip. The designer custom-built the motor in each driver, to handle more clean power. Otherwise, these were simple paper-cone car speakers, the cheapest 6x9 Jensen made.
It didn't matter that other speakers had greater frequency bandwidth. None of them had the coherence and sheer organic glory of this home-built using little oval drivers. The engineer wasn't claiming he'd beaten Quads, Dahlquists, Tympanies, KLH Nines, etc. His point to make was that hi-fi had been heading down the wrong road with crossover-intensive, complex, multi-driver speakers. It wasn't long after that when the abomination of the Infinity IRS showed how right that Jensen engineer was. Then we got the wretched Duntech Sovereign in the '80s.
I wasn't happy about it, but it took 29 more years until I could get coherence, scale, tonal authenticity, dynamic authenticity, burstiness and amp friendliness from a loudspeaker from a company named Zu. Has there been an evolution since then? You bet. My first gen Definitions were a little bright and at high SPLs, a bothersome cabinet talk kicked in. The first Druids had a soft top end, a trifle of shout, tilted to tonal warmth, and had limited lateral scale. But I had built two systems, so I didn't listen to highly scaled music on Druids, and I didn't expect the same sense of solo performer focus on Definitions. Since then, the two models have steadily shown iterative convergence of their relative strengths.
Net today is, there isn't a single crossover speaker I consider listenable from the standpoint of "would I own it?". Even simple crossover-based speakers like a Devore fail to achieve sufficient coherence to sound musically authentic. A Magico or Wilson fails utterly, regardless of their other strengths. Zu Definition delivers an authentic octave-to-octave top-to-bottom balance. The speaker Marc and I use presents music holistically. And having heard Sean Casey's tour-de-force to-date, the Dominance, and knowing what he has in his mind for further refinement of Zu musicality, I know that as new developments enable him to, he will deliver further aural nuance in a musically-convincing way, that doesn't set backwards any of the essential attributes he has delivered thus far.
Generally, the bulk of criticisms I hear people direct toward Zu are more a product of cabinet "talk" than of the full range driver. In Zu, the whole speaker evolves and the cabinet gets at least as much (and usually more) attention from Sean as the FRD. The Definition 4 cabinet design is now approaching 10 years old, 8+ years in production. Druid has been through two complete cabinet composition and construction revisions in that time. The new Druid 6 is a thorough re-thinking of Zu cabinet materials and methods. The driver is improved, but when the Druid 6 cabinet composition and construction methods are applied to the next generation Definition, you will hear (and see) why it is far better for a Definition 4 owner to stay in the Zu realm and progress to a successor. Depending on means, that could me just moving to a newer Definition. Or it could mean moving up to additional models that will debut in time. Because if you move outside Zu to satisfy some itch, you will give up the essence of coherence + tonal authenticity + spatial & dynamic scale that makes Zu musically convincing, and nearly everything else not so much.
There is a disease in audiophilia I call "the hungry ear." Post-1965 recording practices and the illusory chasing of flat frequency response have fixated most of the hifi consuming population on "event detail" you don't actually hear in any natural situation. Hungry ear syndrome puts your ear in the throat of the singer, but you lose the resonance pipe of the human body. Hungry ear tickles you with a plucked string ratio of transient-to-tone that overplays the former to sacrifice the latter. Hungry ear syndrome separates massed voices and instruments into atomistic projections you would not hear in a performance. It is seeing individual trees and not at all the forest. Hungry ear syndrome is something most vendors in this business are happy to indulge. And we get clinical, dissected music desiccated of tone as a result.
OK, everyone who thinks that is normal and preferable has 98% of the hifi industry's offerings to choose from; and some of the most expensive gear -- especially speakers -- in the business deliver just that. Go ahead and buy it! The experience of most Zu customers -- and I don't mean audio nervosa types -- is that convincing musicality starts with the Zu speaker that works with your budget and space, and then the rest of your audio dollars then go to the right upstream chain. With a Zu speaker, the amp/speaker interface and combination is critical. The amp does not see a crossover. There are SET, push-pull tube, OTL, bi-polar transistor and Class D options that work well. At 101db/w/m combined with very high power handling, you have tremendous range for amplifier preferences. No Zu customer has ever blown a Zu FRD in the field. Yet the burst and speed and dynamism they can deliver from 20 watts or 1200 watts compete with horns, without forcing their flaws on you too.
So, go listen in Marc's room. Make your commentaries (if he wants them). Whatever you don't like may or may not be the speaker at all. But if your suggestion is a crossover-intensive, multi-drivers loudspeaker as some sort of "improvement," don't be surprised if such a suggestion is met with disinterest. We Zu owners have already been down that path and found it seriously compromised. We're not giving up coherence and convincing musicality to get whatever specific thing you think is lacking. Just the way it is.
Phil
I have two completely separate Zu-based systems in my house. One is built about Zu Definition 4, the other now built around Zu Druid 6. I've had Zu speakers exclusively for 14 years and counting. The Definition-based system started with the 1st generation. I upgraded to Definition 2, and then to Definition 4, which has been stable, other than a cap upgrade to the supertweeter's high pass filter, for eight years thus far. I can now see the next Zu Definition on the horizon. The Druid-based system began with a 1st-generation pair that had been factory upgraded to "v2.5" status when I bought them used. That pair saw a series of impromptu improvements whenever Sean Casey visited Los Angeles, culminating in the final version for that 1st gen cabinet, Druid Mk 4-08. When Druid 5 became available they were installed here. And now Druid 6.
Similarly, I have been using Audion SET and PSET power amplification most of this span.
I'm amused to see people write an opinion venturing that Zu Definitions aren't suitable for listening to classical/orchestral/symphonic music. I consider the Definition series one of the few speakers that renders classical music faithfully. I chortle when I read commentary that Definition 4 is a "rough" speaker. Properly setup and driven, it is one of the smoothest in octave-to-octave balance and behavior consistency. I look cockeyed at claims that Definitions lack transparency.
I have been spending my own money on hifi since 1968, and did some tenure in high-end audio retail. I retain relationships in the hifi economy that give me listening access to most of what's available today and what has been available over the last 50 years. That's just context for things I write next.
Zu speakers take some getting accustomed to for many people. If you're like me, you get it within 3 minutes. Some people require 3 days, or 3 weeks, or 3 months. Or 3 years. Some people never get it. What's the reason for the assimilation period? Because from the lowest mid-fi to the highest of the high end, most people have been listening to music presented "wrong." And they think it's normal. There's hi-fi sound and then there's what music played on real instruments in real acoustic spaces and no electronic sound reinforcement sounds like. There are many culprits, but the single most assertive contributor to the bastardizing of music through hifi is crossovers in speakers. The phase anomalies resulting, the tonal thinning and dynamic choking at the crossover points, and the uneven dynamic and transient characteristics imposed by multiple, narrow-purpose, drivers creates a sound hifi consumers have come to hear as normal. But it's not natural. I'll give you a little more context, particularly relevant to the classical music issue and Zu. I grew up an hour west of Philadelphia. From 3rd grade through the end of high school, I attended Philadelphia Orchestra concerts -- Eugene Ormandy was still conducting and serving as music director. In college, I had the Pittsburgh Symphony nearby. In graduate school I had the Boston Symphony and Symphony Hall, which continued through the ten years I lived in the Boston area through throughout the 80s, and maintained a share of a pair of season tickets. I grew up with classical music, great orchestras and good-to-great halls. Until Zu Definitions, I did not listen to classical music very often on stereo systems because no matter how much power and dynamic range a system had, the presentation and tonality was entirely wrong on modern speakers.
The typical high-end speaker measures well but sounds incoherent. We used to accept this because full-range or nearly-full range speakers simply did not sound tonally authentic, or dynamically authentic, in sizes that can be sensibly used domestically. Like everyone else, I had to own and listen to crossover-based speakers for most of my time spending money in this interest, so I generally looked for the simplest. I had two early revelations about the evils of crossovers and multi-drivers speakers. One was on hearing the Quad ESL(57) for the first time in 1970. Yes, it has crossovers. But the Quad ESL crossover uses mostly simple resistors working with the intrinsic capacitance of the panels to yield a 1st order slope, and the panels are by design, materials and characteristics the same. Dynamic range was limited, and the Quad ESL is quite directional. But within its dynamic limits and the listening position the design allows, coherence was not only striking but the speaker created a "lens of authenticity" not found anywhere else at the time, other than the KLH Nine. I have owned both of these in the past. The second revelation about coherence came a few years later when I was in college. There was a Jensen speaker factory nearby. I was working in one of the early true high-end audio emporiums at the birth of what we now call high-end, and had a customer who was an engineer at the Rola-Jenson factory. Their main output was automotive speakers. One day he brought in a speaker he built. It was a personal project, so just a structural prototype, rough-looking but functionally complete. It used a single Jensen 6x9" full range car stereo speaker with whizzer cone, on a very broad, square baffle and a folded vent structure. Consider it cheap, cheerful, and *early* iteration of what we see today in the Voxativ Ampeggio Due. Without the gloss black paint and painstaking craftsmanship! This was 1975. He wanted to put it up against our Dahlquists, Quads, Magneplanar Tympani III-A, etc. So we wired it up to an Audio Research Dual 76a and let 'er rip. The designer custom-built the motor in each driver, to handle more clean power. Otherwise, these were simple paper-cone car speakers, the cheapest 6x9 Jensen made.
It didn't matter that other speakers had greater frequency bandwidth. None of them had the coherence and sheer organic glory of this home-built using little oval drivers. The engineer wasn't claiming he'd beaten Quads, Dahlquists, Tympanies, KLH Nines, etc. His point to make was that hi-fi had been heading down the wrong road with crossover-intensive, complex, multi-driver speakers. It wasn't long after that when the abomination of the Infinity IRS showed how right that Jensen engineer was. Then we got the wretched Duntech Sovereign in the '80s.
I wasn't happy about it, but it took 29 more years until I could get coherence, scale, tonal authenticity, dynamic authenticity, burstiness and amp friendliness from a loudspeaker from a company named Zu. Has there been an evolution since then? You bet. My first gen Definitions were a little bright and at high SPLs, a bothersome cabinet talk kicked in. The first Druids had a soft top end, a trifle of shout, tilted to tonal warmth, and had limited lateral scale. But I had built two systems, so I didn't listen to highly scaled music on Druids, and I didn't expect the same sense of solo performer focus on Definitions. Since then, the two models have steadily shown iterative convergence of their relative strengths.
Net today is, there isn't a single crossover speaker I consider listenable from the standpoint of "would I own it?". Even simple crossover-based speakers like a Devore fail to achieve sufficient coherence to sound musically authentic. A Magico or Wilson fails utterly, regardless of their other strengths. Zu Definition delivers an authentic octave-to-octave top-to-bottom balance. The speaker Marc and I use presents music holistically. And having heard Sean Casey's tour-de-force to-date, the Dominance, and knowing what he has in his mind for further refinement of Zu musicality, I know that as new developments enable him to, he will deliver further aural nuance in a musically-convincing way, that doesn't set backwards any of the essential attributes he has delivered thus far.
Generally, the bulk of criticisms I hear people direct toward Zu are more a product of cabinet "talk" than of the full range driver. In Zu, the whole speaker evolves and the cabinet gets at least as much (and usually more) attention from Sean as the FRD. The Definition 4 cabinet design is now approaching 10 years old, 8+ years in production. Druid has been through two complete cabinet composition and construction revisions in that time. The new Druid 6 is a thorough re-thinking of Zu cabinet materials and methods. The driver is improved, but when the Druid 6 cabinet composition and construction methods are applied to the next generation Definition, you will hear (and see) why it is far better for a Definition 4 owner to stay in the Zu realm and progress to a successor. Depending on means, that could me just moving to a newer Definition. Or it could mean moving up to additional models that will debut in time. Because if you move outside Zu to satisfy some itch, you will give up the essence of coherence + tonal authenticity + spatial & dynamic scale that makes Zu musically convincing, and nearly everything else not so much.
There is a disease in audiophilia I call "the hungry ear." Post-1965 recording practices and the illusory chasing of flat frequency response have fixated most of the hifi consuming population on "event detail" you don't actually hear in any natural situation. Hungry ear syndrome puts your ear in the throat of the singer, but you lose the resonance pipe of the human body. Hungry ear tickles you with a plucked string ratio of transient-to-tone that overplays the former to sacrifice the latter. Hungry ear syndrome separates massed voices and instruments into atomistic projections you would not hear in a performance. It is seeing individual trees and not at all the forest. Hungry ear syndrome is something most vendors in this business are happy to indulge. And we get clinical, dissected music desiccated of tone as a result.
OK, everyone who thinks that is normal and preferable has 98% of the hifi industry's offerings to choose from; and some of the most expensive gear -- especially speakers -- in the business deliver just that. Go ahead and buy it! The experience of most Zu customers -- and I don't mean audio nervosa types -- is that convincing musicality starts with the Zu speaker that works with your budget and space, and then the rest of your audio dollars then go to the right upstream chain. With a Zu speaker, the amp/speaker interface and combination is critical. The amp does not see a crossover. There are SET, push-pull tube, OTL, bi-polar transistor and Class D options that work well. At 101db/w/m combined with very high power handling, you have tremendous range for amplifier preferences. No Zu customer has ever blown a Zu FRD in the field. Yet the burst and speed and dynamism they can deliver from 20 watts or 1200 watts compete with horns, without forcing their flaws on you too.
So, go listen in Marc's room. Make your commentaries (if he wants them). Whatever you don't like may or may not be the speaker at all. But if your suggestion is a crossover-intensive, multi-drivers loudspeaker as some sort of "improvement," don't be surprised if such a suggestion is met with disinterest. We Zu owners have already been down that path and found it seriously compromised. We're not giving up coherence and convincing musicality to get whatever specific thing you think is lacking. Just the way it is.
Phil
