KeithR's "Dream Speaker" Search

[Ron Resnick]

. . . the very thing that makes a speaker possibly not so great with big scale complex music is sometimes the feature that also can make them so great in other ways and for smaller scale music.

+1

I think musical genre preference significantly drives loudspeaker preference.

 

[the sound of Tao]

+1

I think musical genre preference significantly drives loudspeaker preference.

Completely Ron and a good setup often leads you to explore new music and then when your musical preferences shift or grow it can lead to a total rethink on gear... and sometimes a second setup ... or even a third .

 

[213Cobra]

Completely Ron and a good setup often leads you to explore new music and then when your musical preferences shift or grow it can lead to a total rethink on gear... and sometimes a second setup ... or even a third .

Yes. I have a single FRD system optimized for intimacy that can do tenable scale; and a double FRD system optimized for scale that can do tenable intimacy. Even the amps are different but the front ends are very much the same.

Phil

 

[bonzo75]

Completely Ron and a good setup often leads you to explore new music and then when your musical preferences shift or grow it can lead to a total rethink on gear... and sometimes a second setup ... or even a third .

Or you could just create one set up of dual woofer front loaded horns and roll drivers.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Or you could just create one set up of dual woofer front loaded horns and roll drivers.

Might even follow up your lead on that Ked... strangely enough I have something along those lines in the works, but also with a multi 6 x 15 inch isobaric OB sub on either side. Eyes perhaps bigger than stomach... which is why I bought a second LM Set... so I can biamp and also maybe go sans crossover on the widebander horn and roll in a coaxial or a supertweeter horn and just use the other 805/300B amp or even go with a kinki mosfet with rollable opamps for the woofers and OB subs.

 

[bonzo75]

Yes subs below 70 or so. But the Midbass is best in audio, like Henk's apogee grands but with more speed and detail and tone as driven by low watt SETs at 110 db

 

[spiritofmusic]

I have gigantic respect for Phil's knowledge, experience and opinions. Phil's bulls-eye call on the Ampzillas for Keith is but one in a long line of Phil's opinions which have been confirmed in practice.

But I share sound of Tao's puzzlement that Phil hears a full classical symphony orchestra projecting from a single 10" driver. One of the firm audio truths I believe I have learned experientially with dynamic driver loudspeakers is that driver surface area is highly positively correlated with (1) the ability of the speaker to project the scale and width and power of classical symphony orchestra music, and (2) resolution.

MikeL's Evolution Acoustics MM7s, with the largest total driver surface of any loudspeaker I have heard, still holds for me the title of most convincing reproduction of large-scale symphony orchestra music.

For example from the Haley 2s to the Sonja 2.3s to the XV Jr. I hear big increases in resolution, believability and convincing reproduction of large-scale soundstage. (And I think the three additional midbass drivers in the XV Jr. are responsible for the biggest step up.)

In theory I agree with much of Phil's philosophy about single drivers and wide-range drivers. If my system ever is hatched it uses a wide-range driver from 200Hz to 18kHz.

Ron, it's a bit misleading to say "single 10" driver" re Zu.
Yes, spkrs like Cube Audio Nenuphar use a single 10" driver per spkr. However the Zus you heard here in 2018 have a pair of 10", tweeter, and 12" sub woofer per side, now augmented w supertweeter. So I'm running 5 drivers per side. The new Definitions will run to three 10", three supertweeters and sub per side, 14 drivers in total R and L. The new Dominances, 24 drivers in total.

For me, the key to getting a massive change in my Zus being very satisfying on big complex classical/jazz/other acoustic, has been a room environment that minimises harshness, the right power to them (70W Class A in a 1000 sq ft/7000 cub ft room, plus 350W Class D to subs under 40Hz) "locking" the sound to the room meaning that there is full intimacy at lower levels and full saturation well before 12 o/c on the volume. Add my solutions on clean power, vibration management w my challenging floor, Duelunds caps and Lundahls mods, addition of supertweeters and maxxing analog setup, means the Zus have truly become rewarding w classical.

Proof of the pudding being my reaching for classical first every listening session, and buying way more classical lps than my usual genre stuff.

I would never claim the Zus are an unimpeded open window on classical (Pnoes horns on 1.46W Mayer 46 tubes in a room 2-3x the size of mine remains the reference for that), there remains a Zu-ness quality that is impossible to get past, a gentle barrier to a totally uncoloured presentation, and music can be a tad hard in the upper mids/lower treble (which my visitor UK Paul noted).

But as a bottleneck, this is way more benign than most. And my point remains, even me as an ardent Zu fan is totally suprised by how good classical now sounds thru them. But it's taken effort in my challenging circumstances to reveal the kind of attributes I've only heard in some of the best systems I've visited.

And on other challenging genres like prog, fusion, electronica, so many so-called great spkrs struggle to cut the mustard.

 

[the sound of Tao]

Yes subs below 70 or so. But the Midbass is best in audio, like Henk's apogee grands but with more speed and detail and tone as driven by low watt SETs at 110 db

Yes, that is the issue for me, if I go biamp direct I’ll need a quiter amp for the widebander. Or I can stick with the crossover for widebander and midwoofers and use the amp I already have (and love).
The other potential I’m exploring is to instead go field coils for the midwoofers which would get me to 99bd sensitivity for the full range panel and then keep to the multiple neodymium 15 inch woofers for the sub. I don’t really want to be working with much more than 100db sensitivity as it’s a completely different amp noise envelope environment.

 

[morricab]

A mate had a few different Zu’s including the Definitions, Druids and Souls and then he left them behind in 2014. His story was always about a frustrated love with them which he then solved (personal solution for him) when he moved on to his first pair of horns. So for a time I got considerable exposure to a range of the Zu.

I enjoyed what they could do on some genres of music but then put to task with classical (and especially large scale) and they musically just weren’t up to it. The simpler raw qualities that acted as virtues in simpler and rawer forms of music started to trip over themselves when they then needed to get more sophisticated and more layered. My mate always had other speakers that he’d go for as his primary use and kept at the Zus for an occasional feed of the dense tonal shove that was their striking flavour.

So I got where Marc was coming from with Zu but the way then that Marc has had to go in modifying them to extraordinary levels to make them more satisfying with classical is legendary. But no marriage is without trial and some frustration in a wild and lasting love affair is just part and sometimes parcel of our oh so OCD hobby.

Maybe that only a few here are quite overtly pro Zu and those that do seem then to be very much in love with them for me supports a notion of Zu as more of a fine niche speaker (and that could also be read as nice speaker). So maybe also the traditional Zu signature is a perfect fit for a few but too much of a definite flavour then for others. For some clearly like Phil and Marc (and others) Zu just had them in their spell at hello and that is the perfect outcome. We all should meet our great matches in time.

I also completely get that Zu have also gotten better at things that were areas for development over the last decade but after a bit of exposure my interest too moved on to horns and ribbons simply because I found speakers that let me forget their nature and fall into the music, but for me whenever I heard the Zus I was always more aware that it was a Zu speaker I was listening to. I admire the Zu virtues but couldn't live with their particular constraints and given my particular set of musical loves areas that needed to be more core strengths.

Great variability in nature is why speakers are so caught up in such very personal preferences in outcomes as demonstrated in this thread on Keith’s speaker journey. So there is plenty out there to admire but perhaps very few that we can then live with... which is why we should celebrate difference rather than thinking there is any one universal solution, speakers need to be just as different as we all are.

I come at this from a couple of different angles. First, like most, I was a cone/dome guy and had a number of "normal" speakers like Dynaudio, Paradigm etc. What changed for me to some extent was in college I got my hands on some Klipsch La Scalas that simply rocked the house and I became "woke" to the idea of dynamics with a capital D (La Scalas are about 104db/watt and fully horn). However, I was always fascinated by ribbons and planars in general and went quickly towards ribbon designs, the best two I had being the Infinity IRS Beta and the Apogee Caliper Signatue. I was also experimenting with electrostats and ultimately preferred large, full-range estats to the ribbons as they had greater coherence (they were single driver or multiple panels all doing the same thing like a large single driver) and to my ears better bass (even better than the Beta's servo controlled woofer towers). BUT the horn sound never really left my ears. I got back into horns with my Odeons (in hindsight an amazing choice) and now my experimentation system. Coming back to high sensitivity designs naturally lead me to be curious about single drivers. But I had a similar experience with them as you. So, I have with my experimentation system been trying to blend the strengths of the single driver with the strengths of the horn. I started to get this idea after reading about Troels Gravessen's TQWT designs but wanting higher than 95db sensitivity. The single drivers make outstanding midranges and horns seem at their best in the upper ranges. Interestingly, the fullrange drivers can be coaxed to make good bass, especially in TQWT cabinets but not at really high volumes.

I would actually be interested in hearing a Zu design where a crossover is used at around 3-5Khz to the very nice Radian 850pb they are using as a "super tweeter" (a very strange choice for a super tweeter I have to say....probably the Radian 475pb would be a better candidate)...this would probably improve their handling of complex music significantly and reduce their signature as well.

As for YG, to me this kind of speaker throws the baby out with the bath water...but that is just my opinion.

 

[spiritofmusic]

Brad, you'll be waiting a long time. There will never be a crossover in a Zu design. And I believe Sean is moving away from Radian tweeters to supertweeters dual concentric within the three full range drivers he's envisaging for the Definitions and Dominances.

 

[bonzo75]

Radian 950pb beryllium and the 475 tweeter are just superb. Similar in style to TAD 4003 and up there with AER BD4

 

[morricab]

Well, first, I did say that I don't consider any single FRD Zu speaker before the Druid 6 as fully convincing on symphonic music. And even with the Druid 6, that would be suitable only in a fairly contained room. But I listen to symphonic music on Definition 4s which each have TWO 10" FRDs + a supertweeter + a 12" powered sub. The sub and the tweet are on low pass and high pass filters, respectively. The amp sees no crossover; the FRD is driven directly.

This is all very much affected by the room one is trying to pressurize for crescendo at orchestral scale. 47 years ago, I could put orchestral scale in a dorm room with a pair of Large Advents and a Marantz 240 power amp. But in the hifi store I worked in, which was in a large house with an open plan first floor, doing the same took Double Advents (we were doing it before Harry) and a Marantz 500, bridged Crown DC-300A used as monoblocks, or later an SAE 2500. At that efficiency, even an ARC Dual 150 wouldn't cut it. We did the same thing with Double Dahlquist DQ10. racked like the double Quad ESL system. I don't know anything about Mike's room, but he has...what...22 drivers in stereo in that system? Are you saying no speaker can do convincing symphonic music with fewer than 22 drivers? C'mon...there must be dial on that concept -- it can't be a switch.

The largest driven surface area we could set up in that store was via Magneplanar Tympani IIIa tri-amped with monoblocked Crown DC300As on the bass and ARC Dual 76As on mid and treble panels, using an ARC or Levinson electronic crossover. It didn't matter how loud you played it, the symphonic perspective was 2/3rds back in Boston's Symphony Hall, because the Tympanis had resolution but not shove. With the Double Advents, the sound was less resolved but more vivid. You got pulled up to a seat about 4/10ths back.

Back when I was still dependent on crossover speakers. I ran "doubles" a few times and found that doubling the driven surface areas yielded more than 2X benefits in scale and dynamism. Double Advents sounded disproportionately scaled over a single pair. Same with double LS3/5a (yes, I really did it, to great benefit). And in one of my large rooms in Massachusetts, I briefly ran doubled ProAc EBS -- in some ways a YG Hailey more traditionally constructed circa 1985. I point this out to say that Definition using two FRDs instead of one yields disproportionate gains in scale and dynamism over a single Zu FRD. And then there's the 12" sub taking on the foundational duties. Which has more driven surface area -- Zu Defs with 4 10.5" FRDS + 2 12" subs + two compression supertweeters, or YG Haileys? YG doesn't spec its drivers' sizes but it's easy to see, Definitions win on driven surface. There is the contention that a 10" FRD can't resolve upper frequencies but that's a theory based on old materials and build methods for the drivers. Zu is inspired by the past but not living in it.

The next Definition you will hear this spring, Ron, is now likely to show up sporting three Zu FRDs, each with its captive concentric supertweeter. The 12" sub continues. And you will hear Dominance 2, which including supertweeters will have 18 total drivers per stereo pair. How many Zu drivers are necessary for convincing symphonic presentation in a normal room?

If Sean stays on schedule, we'll see come Spring.

Phil

Ever played with active crossovers Phil? The amps then still see a crossoverless driver. I am doing this now in my experimental system and it is working very well to the point I don't want to build passive ones.

 

[morricab]

Yes, that is the issue for me, if I go biamp direct I’ll need a quiter amp for the widebander. Or I can stick with the crossover for widebander and midwoofers and use the amp I already have (and love).
The other potential I’m exploring is to instead go field coils for the midwoofers which would get me to 99bd sensitivity for the full range panel and then keep to the multiple neodymium 15 inch woofers for the sub. I don’t really want to be working with much more than 100db sensitivity as it’s a completely different amp noise envelope environment.

You should try full active with your PAP system...direct to the driver from the amp is also part of the appeal.

 

[morricab]

Radian 950pb beryllium and the 475 tweeter are just superb. Similar in style to TAD 4003 and up there with AER BD4

I am getting a pair of 475s to compare with my Beyma CP350Ti 1 inch drivers...this comparison will be on an Iwata 600 and 18 sound XT120.

 

[spiritofmusic]

What is fascinating w the Zus is that each new model/upgrade on predecessor absolutely maintains the core DNA of tone density, but expands on the neutrality/transparency aspects. Designer Sean absolutely knows what he wants from a sound at home, and yet is humble enough to know these other aspects all contribute to the illusion of real, and critically make Zu more genre-agnostic. For me, my optimised Zu breathiness and liveliness on classical is by far the biggest uptick on listening to music in the new room. And I know deep down Sean's recent design innovations, from stiffer but lighter drivers and cabinets, efficiency increases in going to three full range drivers per side, likely greater shimmer and air w multiple supertweeters extended to 30kHz and maxxed out/reinforced subs structure, can only take Zu way down the path of being not just palatable on classical, but likely a great transducer on it, and other complex acoustic genres.

 

[bonzo75]

I am getting a pair of 475s to compare with my Beyma CP350Ti 1 inch drivers...this comparison will be on an Iwata 600 and 18 sound XT120.

With beryllium diaphragm?

 

[morricab]

Completely Ron and a good setup often leads you to explore new music and then when your musical preferences shift or grow it can lead to a total rethink on gear... and sometimes a second setup ... or even a third .

My main system (Odeon La Bohem and Aries Cerat gear) responds very well to a wide range of music as I am constantly discovering on Qobuz.

My experimental system is doing quite well on a wide range as well (everything from Mussorgsky/Tchaikovsky to basic pop) and is perhaps sharper and clearer than the main system due primarily to the active crossover setup (I plan to confirm this eventually by swapping in the active setup on the main rig and bypassing the passive xover) but still doesn't have the impact that I get from a 10 inch mid/woofer in a TQWT horn design (the 8 inch supravox doesn't seem to have the same midbass shove but it does go a bit deeper due to the tuning of the TQWT). At the moment i am using the same tweeter in both (Beyma CP350Ti) but different horns (Odeons have a 10 inch spherical horn from solid wood).

 

[morricab]

With beryllium diaphragm?

Not initially, we'll see how it works with the Al diaphragm with mylar surround.

 

[KeithR]

As for YG, to me this kind of speaker throws the baby out with the bath water...but that is just my opinion.

I think you also have to understand I was comfortable leaving tube amps because of my disability and struggle with tube reliability. Can fully see someone who won't do that ignore the YG route.

But also remember how many high efficiency speakers I've heard (unlike others) and how much better the Haileys 2 are pretty much than all of those designs. I would take YG over Tune Audio, Voxativ, Zu, Devore, (obviously), JBL, etc. that I auditioned. The only ones I liked were the AG Duo XD which won't work in my room and I had reservations about bass quality/coherency.

Right now, I'm quite comfortable trying this path and seeing where it leads me. I'll also say, look at the kinds of people near me who now like YG speakers. Trust me, Phil or Jeff or Ron even liking a YG is pretty surprising. I'd also note the local Harbeth/Devore/JBL/Klipsch horn dealer is taking on the line and the AG dealer in London feels its the best dynamic driver speaker out there.

 

[DaveC]

I think you also have to understand I was comfortable leaving tube amps because of my disability and struggle with tube reliability. Can fully see someone who won't do that ignore the YG route.

But also remember how many high efficiency speakers I've heard (unlike others) and how much better the Haileys 2 are pretty much than all of those designs. I would take YG over Tune Audio, Voxativ, Zu, Devore, (obviously), JBL, etc. that I auditioned. The only ones I liked were the AG Duo XD which won't work in my room and I had significant reservations about bass quality/coherency.

Right now, I'm quite comfortable trying this path and seeing where it leads me. I'll also say, look at the kinds of people near me who now like YG speakers. Trust me, Phil or Jeff or Ron liking a YG is pretty surprising. I'd also note the local Harbeth/Devore/JBL/Klipsch horn dealer is taking on the line and the AG dealer in London feels its the best dynamic driver speaker out there.

Objectively, it IS the best speaker out there, there's not much left to be critical about! The low efficiency is not ideal, but when setup properly I don't hear any issues with it, with the crossovers, etc. The price is also on the high side, but the manufacturing really is cost-no-object, it's amazing what they're willing to go through to produce the parts they use.

I think even Morricab would be impressed if he heard an optimal YG system. It's a good reminder that there are many paths to nirvana, SETs and horns aren't the only way.