Anyone listen to Zu Audio's Definition Mk3?


Comparisons with the 1.5s and the others that came before? Getting the itch; again......
128x128warrenh
213 writes

Cables are the least urgent thing to get right.

As much as I love to read his thoughts I do believe the wires made by Zu is not going to bring out the very best in the Def2 or 3/4. I have the Verial IC and installing it in place of my Teo is a flat 2D sound that must be removed after a short listening session. Same for the Event SC. I do believe for the $$$ it is killer wire and think if you have it you have not been taken by the $$$ wire game. I do believe that you are missing a lot if you stick with said wire.

JPS Aluminata also will unleash the glory of the Def speakers.
It's more important to preserved Zu's B3 all the way to the amp than it is to futz with alternate cables, for getting the most out of Def4. This is the thing that All Def2 owners as well as Zu owners who have owned only their speakers during the "B3 Speakon interruption" -- you don't know what was left untapped when B3 was taken away. Even on the less resolving Druid, this is apparent if you have an early pair incorporating the Speakon interface, and upgraded over time to v4 status. You can clearly hear gains from exotic and even inappropriately expensive speaker cables, but when I then run B3 all the way from driver back to the amp outputs, rightness sets in.

So anyone enamored of cable differences and wanting to spend money on that path, knock yourself out. Cables do sound different, though landing on "better" is a crapshoot. Most are not improvements, occasionally one may be. The best non-Zu speaker cable I've heard so far is the Auditorium 23.

In ICs, if you're getting a flat 2D sound because you've substituted Verial for Teo, something else is likely wrong or there's something about the parametric qualities of the other cable that your listening mind interprets as dimensional. If the latter is the case, fine -- no one can argue with that. But it's far from generalizable that Zu Mission or Event ICs or speaker cables (or the older Verial/Ibis) are not capable of conveying the depth dimension information.

Still, cables are the least urgent thing to get right of all the variables you can pay attention to, but any given individual might prioritize a cable change benefit they hear, ahead of something else that to others makes a larger difference. This pursuit offers more ways to spend your money than most people have money, so if cables are your drug, go with it.

However, one of the best benefits of Zu speakers in all their architectural variants is their ability to be adapted widely and to yield excellent and convincing music fidelity with much less than state-of-the-art gear, and with fairly casual set-up. In fact this is elemental to the Zu brand. They want you to obsess less. They want to deliver exceptional value so you can spend less money on gear and more on music. They want you to be able to leverage ultra-fi gear but not mandate it you must spring for it. Just as Omen Def or Superfly can clearly leverage the benefits of associated amps, preamps and sources far above their price, Def4 can deliver its prodigious sonic presence when lashed to modest associated gear and still sound beautiful. My *advice* for how someone allocates their resources across gear categories will vary according to a buyer's goals, and it usually won't be to mate Defs with a cheap amp, but there are exceptions.

Additionally, while Zu does nothing to prevent the typical audiophile obsessions, they don't encourage them either. Like me, if they ran the world, their speakers wouldn't be hidden in dedicated listening rooms and man-caves -- they'd be out in the living areas of the houses of their owners, to be heard and seen in everyday living. So while a portion of the market buys Zu and installs their speakers and cables in systems located in dedicated audiophile rooms, Sean designs for the buyer who will install them in a living room where there's just one logical place for speakers, from a utility perspective for the way the room is used, and that setup is going to sound good too. Level 'em; get the toe-in right; you're good. In the true-fidelity speakers market, Zu is the "PnP" -- in speaker terms the Plop and Play" -- solution that also happens to reward obsessives and tweakers who are inclined to nth degree optimization.

Phil
No doubt the Spatial Black Hole has its benefits, and I know it can mitigate acoustic anomalies in very troublesome rooms, which it sounds like you, Spirit, have had to cope with. That was a good suggestion Sean offered.

But before the wider audience begins to think this sort of thing is necessary -- yet another box -- two things are worth keeping in mind. First, in decades of listening to both live and recorded music, I've yet to hear any of it in an acoustically perfect room. And when I've heard a "perfect room" like an anechoic chamber, treated-to-the-hilt listening room, or an engineered recording studio, it didn't sound much like music the way it's actually experienced, though the sound might have been beguiling for reasons other than realism. On the other hand I've heard two rooms that were perfectly convincing for listening to music, and neither were free of anomalies, including audible nodes and standing waves.

The two best "rooms" I've ever heard were 1/ Symphony Hall in Boston. I had a share of season tickets for 10 years when I lived there. It ain't perfect, but it's exceedingly natural, involving and satisfying to hear music performed there. The second "musically perfect" room I've heard was a family room on the first floor of a large Victorian house on the shores of Spy Pond in Arlington, Massachusetts. It wasn't a house I lived in. It happened to be dimensioned to nearly the same proportions as Symphony Hall. Otherwise it was just an untreated family room with normal furnishings, and a combination of large glass windows on two walls, a large fireplace on one long wall, and a shortwall of in-build bookshelves and cabinetry. The thing about that room was "any* combination of gear sounded not merely good but sensational in it. A receiver with a pair of $400 speakers sounded like $30,000 worth of gear, regardless of audible nodes. A friend owned the house and we made a project out of trying to make the room sound bad by installing the most objectionable hifi gear would could find. No avail. Throw it your worst -- that room made everything sound golden.

If you have a dedicated listening room and you want to hone it, have at it. Yup, the room is the big number in the equation of hi-fi. The Black Hole is a one-trick pony tackling a sliver of the problem. But then go out to listen to live music, and think about what you hear, how hearing it in compromised space isn't eliminating your enjoyment, and then go back and question whether your hifi optimization might be creating a more synthetic sound than you intended. Maybe, maybe not.

Agreed, it's absolutely true that sorting out the lowest octave's affects in your room has disproportionate benefits, and the Black Hole may be just the ticket if you have space for it or otherwise are willing to live with its presence. But if you don't have space or aren't willing to accommodate it for whatever reason, and you upgrade to Def4, you will find that the newer speaker excites the room much less, more evenly loads the room with its bass output, and generally reduces unfavorable room/speaker interaction. My moderate bass piling at high SPLs with Def2 is tamed and virtually eliminated with Def4.

The sub-bass user controls are not so simple as Def2's single level control but not so bewilderingly interactive as to cause endless twiddling. The tunability is logical and manageable, IMO. The sub driver is pretty stiff when new, so Sean gave me notice it will take some time to play in. Whereas Def2's level control offered equal gain boost and cut, with most people on setup starting with the sub level control at its midpoint -- 12 o'clock -- and then backing off a bit to perhaps 11 o'clock or boosting a bit to perhaps 1 o'clock, the expectation with Def4 is that cut is the more likely scenario, so in most rooms taking in brand new Def4s, you'll start out with the level control at 9 or 10 and back it off as the driver plays in and becomes more efficient. So I'm still at that beginning stage for level and it's spot-on. The low pass filter hinge frequency is set at 45Hz, the PEQ at 31Hz, and phase is set at 0 shift. I have no complaints but I expect to tweak these settings as the 12" driver plays in and limbers up.

Despite Def4's truly full range, I have the fewest resonance anomalies of any speaker I've heard in the room, and that includes well above the bass range too. So whatever problems you might have now with Def2 are going to be mitigated by Def4, *possibly* to the point of irrelevance.

Last, I dug further in the cabinet differences between Def2 and Def4. The front baffle is immensely stronger on Def4 than Def2, both because the further-apart spacing of the FRDs leaves more material in place at the juncture of three drivers, and (more important) the large compression tweeter and its lens form a stressed, compressing, rigid member that seriously boosts the rigidity of the front baffle at what would normally be its weakest area in an FRD-T-FRD arrangement. This is a major factor in further reducing front baffle talk from the levels reached in Def2 compared to Def1.5. Then, what you can't see is that to further drain the FRD's frame-radiated energy away from the baffle into the interior of the superstructure, each FRD's isolation chamber has an interior front-to-rear taper formed by interior side plates that are cleated into the front/side panels' mitre join, and angled inward by 15 degrees, then fastened into the rear panel. This nearly eliminates side panel talk highly evident in Def1.5 and much attenuated in Def2, plus drains the FRD energy into the rest of the cabinet where it is then steeply damped by the rigid aluminum plinth that bears the rest of the mass of the speaker.

Phil
Phil, what other wire have you demoed in your system? In audio, hearing is believing. I know Glory has performed extensive experiments with wire, conditioning, amplification, and sources in addition to hearing other Zu based systems, and his experience has been consistent: the Zus are not impervious to associated gear. System resolution may also play a role in discerning wire changes. There is a significant differrence between a set of 845 monos and an ASR in terms of noise floor. The ASR is a better microscope.

Your comments about rooms are spot on IMO. Overdamped and synthetic sounding is the norm. Older homes with vaulted, parabolic ceilings and certain concert halls do a better job propagating ambient energy.
Some interesting assertions here:

>>SET amps are good for what they do but there are other amps that from top to bottom will out run them. <<

Bring me one.

There are a LOT of SET amp choices but they aren't all equally good. You don't have to go all the way to an Audio Note Ongaku. Until you specifically hear an Audion silver content Black Shadow (845 SET) or Golden Dream (300B PSET) monoblock pair on Defintion 4, you won't know whether anything allegedly SOTA can meet or exceed it. People who have heard this next to ARC REF seris, Dartzheel, Nagra, etc. who prefer the Audion aren't compromising for SET. So, sure, at any given point of time maybe there's something new that beats a stellar SET amp on a Zu crossoverless speaker. Could be. But no push-pull tube amp at any price has shown me ability to hide its crossover grunge. No SS amp at any price has shown the holistic tone of highly developed SET. But I'm open to the discovery.

>>I have found a huge upgrade in Footers by Equarack/Stillpoint Ultra under the Def2 that transforms the sound of the speaker.<<

Definitely easy to accept. Foundations are inflential on resonance management. The effects are specifically unpredictable dependent on other system, room and resting surface factors but it's certainly worth investigation to determine the right upgrade for your environment.

>>...but if you have the Def2 with the new Nano drivers and SOTA gear you just might have better tunes than the Def4 owners with lesser gear.<<

Look, I'm the last person to push people into premature upgrades or to encourage upgrades beyond an individual's ability to spend. Def2 by any measure remains an excellent speaker and plenty of people with more expensive but less capable speakers today would be thrilled with it, along with people who can suddenly buy Definition architecture on the used market at an accessible price.

But until you hear how large the improvements are in Def4 over Def2, the sentiment that Def2 with state-of-the-art gear and a nano-drivers upgrade will be "better" than Def4 with lesser gear, is uninformed conjecture. At some level of comparison, sure. But consider that I and others have noted that CDs are more listenable and enjoyable on Def4 than on Def2, despite Def4 being more revealing in every way, and you can see that the listenability quotient applies as well to modest amps, modest sources, modest cables, modest analog. The smooth extension and spatial openness of the supertweeter plus the surprisingly upgraded bass definition, discipline, room loading and clarity have profound effects on your perception of imaging, midrange performance and tonal engagement.

Somewhere in the mix of SOTA gear on Def2s vs more modest gear in Def4 the proposition might become tenable, and certainly in past Zu speakers I'd have agreed. The equalization in performance between fab gear in Def2 v. acceptable gear in Def4 isn't the slam-dunk given you'd imagine, IMO, which I illustrated to myself a couple of weeks ago. My Quad II push-pull amps designed in 1951 sound on my Def4s superior to my 4X the cost 845 silver content SET amps driving Def2s, but the same 845 SET amps on Def4s blow away all comers thus far and the Quads, good as they are, can't compete.

If you have Def2s and need to stick with them for the forseeable future, be confident you still have a genre-defining speaker that can satisfy you for years to come, especially with Zu's willingness to sell you nano drivers to install in them. Just don't listen to a Def4 until you're prepared to buy them. Or send your Def2s back to become Def3s, to get yourself halfwat way there.

Phil