Just received new Druid VI
With my CAT JL5 they play nice but with the single-ended NAF 845 its magic!
Very revealing and engaging, huge sounsdstage and tight bass
Interesting, i read in reviews that they should be toed in but not with my room. Ok it has 5 corners
It's worth putting some effort into adjusting the floor-to-plinth gap on the Druid 6, to optimize the bass, and getting that done also has some more subtle effects on midrange and soundstaging, due to the driver-to-room acoustic impedance matching that the Griewe principle in Druids performs.
You will find significant differences in various 845 tubes, especially in SET topology, with Druid 6. It is highly resolving and lays bare power tube differences. If your amp has 5687 driver tubes, see if you can find Bendix 6900 to sub. The Bendix 6900 was designed for ICBM use, so it has a Nonex (non-expansion) glass envelope, and the internal structure is designed to withstand 500Gs of force. It is a 10,000+ hours tube, nearly indestructible except by hammer, and in place of an electrically-similar 5687 gives most SET amps a more transparent, vivid, projecting sound. Otherwise, if you stick with the 5687, NOS Tung Sol and Raytheon are splendid.
Toe-in for Druid 6 is much shallower than with prior Druids and there are many rooms where no toe-in whatsoever is needed. The D6 has less directionality than any prior Druid, and is the first Druid to approach (but doesn't equal) the spatial scale of the dual-FRD Definition. So particularly in your 5-corners room, it seems sensible that a straight-ahead projection works well for you. You just essentially have to toe-in a bit and then incrementally reduce toe-in until the center of the soundstage gets a hole torn in it. If that doesn't happen before you get to firing the drivers straightaway, then there you have it.
You can run Druid 6 on 2w 45 SET amps, but generally they are snappiest and best in the 15w - 50w range, depending on room and listener expectations. ~20w seems a threshold for excitement, but low power p-p amps can be an exception. I have a pair of custom 2a3 p-p monoblocks I sometimes use on D6 @ 13w that are both relaxed and energetic, and still able to throw a full symphony into the room. Quad II monoblocks sound particularly great on Druids because an anomaly of the Quad II is that if you run the standard 8 ohm transformer taps into the 16 ohms Druid6, the Q2 peak output is only marginally reduced (21.5w down to ~18.5w) but the Class A output is 14.25w! Otherwise, for 300B PSET or P-P, 845 SET, or single-ended pentode circuits like KT150 SEP or EL156 SEP, ~20w+ gives shove and bloom. The 16 ohms load also tames many solid state amps, so options like the 47 Labs Gaincard, M2Tech Crosby and various First Watt kitchen table amps from Nelson Pass become seriously credible.
Phil
