Zu Druid 6, Part III
It sounds perfect, but there’s a backside to the coin. Druid 6 is not forgiving of bad recordings, cheesy mixes, idiotic mastering. It lays bares faults in performance, recording decisions by the engineer, mastering, pressings (if vinyl). It is intolerant of runaway digititis. The manic sawing of digital compression loses the loincloth producers try to cover it with. The nasty bits of degraded fidelity traded away for expense reduction are naked for all to see.
You can ameliorate the relentless truthfulness of Druid 6 by choices upstream. A more forgiving phono cartridge or more sonically elastic phone preamp or DAC. Get the right tubes for your new configuration. Back off sheer resolution a trace with Zu Mission cables instead of Event 2. Or not. Go for the unmitigated, all-nude, vivid Druid 6 experience. Hear the beauty and the beast in modern recordings. You’ll thrill to music recorded in the pre-multi-track, pre-all-solid-state studio era. Recordings from the days of vacuum tube consoles and mics, with performers in the same room, have a holistic, tuneful sound mostly lost today, except for recordings from a few performers. Those recordings have a vividness perfectly transduced by Druid 6 and projected into your domestic space. With Druid 6, a modern, congested, over-processed, excessively-compressed assault is revealed for the noisefest it is. If you can’t handle that, you need Druid 5 or you need an obfuscating amp for poor recordings, and another amp for great ones.
Which means Druid 6 isn’t for everybody, and that’s a good thing. Because Zu can’t make as many of them as it can build Druid 5 in the same period of time. And Druid 6 costs about twice as much as its esteemed predecessor. Hence both are in the line concurrently. And this makes sense. In my TL;DR I noted “Sean built one for himself.” Sean has visited me often enough that I’ve had many hours of listening with him present. I’ve seen Sean spin vinyl of music he loves irrespective of recording or pressing quality, able to note the sonic offenses and still set them aside to let himself be infused by the tunes. And when the worst disk is done playing, he thinks about how to get more out of it.
This makes Druid 6 its own contradiction. It is the least forgiving Zu speaker ever, and yet the most fun. It’s seductive and off-putting in equal measure, depending on the quality of the source material. And yet its uncanny PRaT pulls you in to ignore what’s wrong with the source and revel in what’s right.
Zu’s finish quality is higher than ever, running with the best. The jewelry adorning the cabinetry is all functionally mandated, designed to look fab and is perfectly machined. While it sounds like this is as good as Druid can get, there’s no doubt Sean will take Druid further in coming years, but Druid 6 is a high plateau on which it can be parked, bought, enjoyed and admired while another speaker in the Zu line gets the new foundation of materials and build techniques laid down by Druid 6. In the meantime, in Druid 6, Sean Casey is making the one, true, full-range, orthosonic speaker. It doesn’t exaggerate, nor does it shade the truth. It neither spotlights nor romanticizes. It doesn’t make rough, wooly music silken, and it won’t make velvet sounds abrasive. Druid 6 presents Tom Waits and Maria Callas with equal authenticity. Yo Yo Ma and Joe Satriani are equally convincing. Frank Sinatra and Hound Dog Taylor are nothing but themselves.
A (lengthy) note on amplifiers for Zu.
If you’ve read anything prior I’ve posted here about Zu, you know I regard the amp-speaker interface and combination the fulcrum of fidelity for any Zu-based system. As I referenced earlier in having to abandon SET amps with Druid 6, buying this speaker requires careful consideration about the mated amplification. In the past 18 months another development required a complete revision to my power amplification in my Definition 4 system as well, so I have put extended effort into surveying alternate amps for both Zu systems over the past year or so.
In 2017 I had solar panels installed on my roof, and then later that year added Tesla Powerwall batteries. The panels were installed on the area of the roof directly over my living room where the Zu Definition 4 system lives. It’s a one-story rancher, wood construction house, so not much other than air, wood and sheetrock umbrellas my Definition 4 system from the shower of solar RFI. Apart from any RF emissions from the panels, the system has two wireless internet connections: a Wi-Fi connection to my mesh network by the Tesla Powerwall controller, and a cellular connection by the solar system inverter. At the same time, to accommodate the exterior Wi-Fi needs as well as prepare for wireless Roon endpoints to two separate systems, I changed my house Wi-Fi from a Google wireless router to an Eero mesh network.
The result was that my SET amps in the Definition 4 system proved perfect antennas for the shower of RFI bathing my living room, and no tactic for quieting that worked. The first step was to get an active preamp out of the system, so I sold off my crazy-good Melody p2688 tube preamp, which removed about half the problem. It was replaced by the splendid Luxman AT-3000 TVC from the early 1990s – a real work of magnetic art. Once that was added, I had quiet with push-pull tube and solid-state amps. At the time, I still had Druid 5 on the other system, and its location sharply contained the new RFI problem, so my Audion SET amps could still be used there. Then Druid 6 arrived to undermine my commitment to Audion SET. So, now what, for amplifiers?
About a year ago, after years of great difficulty finding a phono preamp that can make an Allnic Puritas phono cartridge sound correct (Allnic’s own phono preamps do not), I ventured a radical experiment to try the M2Tech Joplin Mk2 phono ADC, which I mated to the M2Tech Young Mk3 DAC, both powered by the Van der Graaf linear power supply. For this signal, The ADC converts analog to 24/192 digital and the DAC converts the processed phono analog digital signal to analog at 24/192 decoding. With RIAA done in the digital realm, and gain adjustable by 1 db increments, and a good range of options for cartridge loading, I finally got the Puritas to sound musically convincing. This led me to take a flyer on the M2Tech Crosby power amplifiers as a temporary fix to my Definition 4 power problem so I’d have something good to listen to while I took my time trying alternate tube amps. I bought two Crosby to run as bridged monoblocks. These are Class D amps using ICE modules with an M2Tech proprietary input section for better sound than most ICE-based amps. Into 8 ohms, one Crosby outputs 60w/channel. Run as a bridged monoblock, Crosby outputs 180w. Into the Def4’s 6-ohm load, Crosby should be good for ~270w each.
With a pair of Crosby amps and the Luxman TVC in the Def4 system, I had a quiet system again. In fact, dead-quiet. Quieter than ever! Without the RFI-induced gurgling, sputtering, spitting and whirring coming through my RF-antenna SET amps, I could listen in peace and embark on a tube amp odyssey as I had time.
Chalk up the M2Tech Crosby Class D amp as wonderfully-Zu compatible. This is the best Class D sound I’ve heard, period. Maybe only rivalled by the 47 Labs Gaincard, which has much less power. I prefer these to most bi-polar solid-state amps, only a few of which have somewhat better musicality, usually at less output. Such amps are generally associated with Nelson Pass. So if you are tube phobic or have any other reason to need or prefer a smooth, bursty, dynamic, musically-convincing, high-definition, solid state amplifier for Zu, consider the relatively affordable M2Tech Crosby.
Back to tube amps. At the same time I was considering tube amp alternatives to my long-time Audion SET amplifiers, I also have to note that I regularly am contacted for advice on affordable tube amps for Zu speakers as well. Now, I have a pair of Quad II Jubilee monoblocks, which were the last edition of Quad II amps produced in the UK. They sound quite good on any Zu speaker, so when I got Druid 6 and found them not ideal for SET in the bass region, it was easy to slip them in the Druid 6 system, or to move them over to Definition 4 when I wanted some tube-amplified music. The Quad II pair are always a great backup amp for me, and the closest-to-SET seamlessness I’ve heard in a push-pull amplifier, simple circuit and all that.
But Quad II is built for KT66, with 6L6 an alternative. I had mine pretty tweaked through tube selection: Tubestore Preferred Series 274B rectifier, Mullard mesh plate EF86, Sylvania NOS 6L6 long ago sourced from Mesa Boogie in the form of their legendary STR-415 power pentode. As an alternative I also used cryo’d Tube Doctor KT66. The Quad II sound seriously good but still only 12-15w and the pair could be more elastic. I would love them to have more of the Plasticman kaPow! reach & slam that my Audion Black Shadow 845 SET amps muster.
My system racks are setup for monoblocks, so all stereo amps are ruled out. Meanwhile, as I started my tube amps odyssey, more requests for affordable amp recommendations trickled into my email. Which is why I want to let you know about Ling Xiao Nan and his hand-built, affordable, amplifiers. Xiao Nan designs and builds his amps in the Guangzhou region of China. He is self-taught on the subject of vacuum tubes and amplification, and been building amps for over a decade. He’s also a guitar player, but he’s proud to point out that he is a “full-time amp builder.” You can find Xiao Nan offering amplifiers on eBay under his Tube Fantasy brand, but that’s only a fraction of what’s possible with him. CONTINUED...