1/ All Druid generational advances have been part of a continuum. Even the incremental improvements in original Druid through v4-08 steadily improved the speaker's objectivity without leaving anything essential to the Druid immediacy and intimacy behind. So Druid 5 was pretty much exactly what I expected it to be based on how far v4-08 had come from the original. It certainly sounded more thoroughly modern, owing especially to the upgrade to the Radian 850 supertweeter, so Druid finally sounded harmonically complete. And Druid 5 had seriously quelled the cabinet talk of early version, and the heavier plinth helped ground the speaker. D5 was really the first serious revamp of the form factor for resonance control.
Conceptually, Druid 6 is of the same evolutionary continuum, but it is such a holistic attack on energy waste and noise, that resulting performance sounds like a reset of the design. Every aspect of Druid 6 music presentation is objectively better than Druid 5. The immediately-striking boosts are in bass depth and character, and reach of its dynamic projection into a room. Brand new it's tight like all brand new Zu speakers, then in a month or two the FRD limbers up and the dielectrics burn in and you are startled and impressed by how much more dynamic life there is to Druid 6 than Druid 5. As I said at the outset, it's
*vivid*! With time all the other factors bloom: tone, definition spatial projection, tonal linearity, etc. and you get the sense the Druid 5 was the end of an evolutionary line; Druid 6 is the start of a new vector. It's also significant that in the past, Druid advancements tended to be informed by new techniques pioneered in Definition. Now, Druid 6 became the R&D project yielding the foundational principles for the next Definition, next Soul, Soul Supreme and even the eventual "Experience." With any luck, the eventual Experience will benefit from trickle-up from Druid 6 and trickle-down from Dominance.
2/ I didn't elongate my commentary on Druid 6 with a lot of detail about the cabinet and drivers because the raw facts were fairly extensively catalogued by Srajan Ebaen, with lots of help from Sean, in Six Moons 10 or 11 months ago, here:
http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/zu3/2.html
I didn't want to be too redundant or end up with something so long,
nobody would read it.
Here's what Sean Casey had to say about this to me last autumn:
"...Really, the main feature, which is also to say the largest benefit to fidelity, is our new full-range driver. It is designed to mate with the new Druid cabinet in such a way as to drastically reduce the system’s reflected energy—noise generated by driver and cabinet are all significant reduced—without having to burden the loudspeaker with the tradition of huge dollops of sound-to-heat damping material. The new driver fits within the Druid-VI cabinet's full-depth 90? precision machined conical socket; the very high dynamic compression, tension and torque forces are generated and distributed through the driver, massive backside thrust washer and the cabinet’s superstructure. Such a tightly controlled mechanical impedance transfer system allows us to off-load and direct this undesirable yet unavoidable* dirty energy from the cone assembly and driver framework and move it into targeted nodal/transfer rods within the loudspeaker. The improvements in sound are significant and are very easy to hear and measure throughout all domains of fidelity.
"*Sure, if we we could get upwards of 120dB-SPL/1W @1m we wouldn’t have to do this, as nearly all that dirty energy would be converted into nearly noise-free sound waves.
"The super tweeter, while still based on the fantastic Radian 850 is also new and also employs the same 90? precision machined conical socket-type mounting outlined in the full-range driver text.
"The cabinet is crazy. For that I would reference the article over at six moons http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews2/zu3/2.html
"New base works with the new cabinet."
Now, when I reference the focus on the cabinet and energy management in Druid 6, I think of the new FRD and ST drivers casing and interfaces with the cabinet as integral to the cabinet revisions. If you could install the current D6 drivers in a D5 cabinet, the resulting speaker would sound different from a D5 but it wouldn't be a D6. Similarly if you just installed D5 drivers in a D6 cabinet, you still don't have a Druid 6. One without the other only goes so far. So, particularly the tension mounting of the FRD, not having it just hung from the baffle, is a huge step forward and making the speaker tonally more objective and dynamically both more precise and more energetic. But the designs of the drivers, how they are mounted, and how the cabinet suppresses noise and routes "dirty energy" to ground are products of holistic engineering to boost the directness and prominence of the FRD's transducer function over noise and distortion. In toto, I consider the holistic and integrated energy management in Druid 6 to be more the source of the great leap forward for this form factor, than the continuing electro-magnetic and materials doping of the drivers themselves.
Which means the next Definition is going to be a kick-ass speaker! And so will the diminutive Soul/Soul Supreme. I've learned that Sean noodles many changes on the way to finalizing a design, so while I think you can easily extrapolate from current Soul how Druid 6 techniques will reset that speaker too, it's too early to try to pin down the nuances. In all the time I've followed the company and used its products, I've seen only that Sean does in loudspeaker -- and cable -- design what we do in software: late binding. One has many threads in play, buys as much time to think as possible, and gels an executed product as far into the pre-production phase as possible.
Because the Soul cabinet is smaller and simpler than Druid 6, it will cost less, and of course it is visually less intrusive to a room. Also it's quite possible that if you want to use SET amplification with a Druid 6-based speaker, the next Soul Supreme will allow it, for not delivering that last bit of new bass extension that D6 delivers compared to D5. On the other hand, to get
every benefit of Druid 6, you have to buy a Druid 6. Nevertheless, you can be confident that a next Soul leveraging Druid 6, will be a true successor speaker to what you own now.
Druid 6 narrows the differences between intrinsic Druid form factor sound and what comes out of Definition 4. That gap is going to open up again with the likely Definition 6, but I fully expect the two 6ers will no longer sound like they are two distinct branches on a family tree. With Druid 6, Sean has laid the foundation for one Zu sound.
Phil
