Zu Soul Superfly

>>A non-audiophile music lover should stick with their 128kb mp3 and their ipod earbuds. Not that they need my encouragement to do this, as they are doing it already.<<

This is the surest way to make sure hi-fi dies as a discrete interest in the panoply of passions people can take up in life, beginning when they are young.

>>Anyone who is thinking about dropping $2K for speakers should care about sound, otherwise they are simply fool with money who wants to show off. In that case, there are flashier looking (and sounding) speakers I would point them to.<<

$2,000 isn't the same thing to everyone. To some people of little hi-fi enthusiasm but enormous music enthusiasm, it's a minor expense. There are far more looking for unfussy speakers who can deliver good sound than there are audiophiles, if they can be made aware of their options. Soul isn't a show-off speaker. It's the Model T or '32 Ford coupe with a flat-head V8, of high-end sound -- and that's a compliment. Such a buyer can care about sound and still not want to obsess on placement, or orient a room's function around their speakers. They can appreciate tonal correctness in a seriously umoptimized installation.

>>Contrary to you, I do not think this individual should not care about placement or flea watts. Room interaction and time smear with high dispersion soul FRD will blur attack and kill sustain. You will have no tone left, or very unremarkable tone, just as my Druids are off axis. There will be nothing to appreciate.<<

For whatever reason you're not reading what I write. I have never written that such a buyer "should not care about placement or flea watts." What I've written is that they should hot have to, to enjoy the essence of their loudspeaker choice. And in fact, Zu has customers who don't and won't. Terrific. At least they're in our tent and can move forward while exposing still more uninitiated people to hi-fi.

It's not a binary result. It's an overstatement to say there will be nothing to appreciate. Room interaction and time smear? The customer I'm referring to has no sense of those nuances, nor interest in getting bogged down by them. Yet they can still hear their system as spectacular to them. Get them interested, then educate.

>>Flea watts kill dynamics with congested midrange at very low listening levels.<<

No, in fact, they don't have to. In some cases, flea watt amps suffer from so much circuit simplicity that they lack sufficient voltage gain. You need a robust preamp, something more in the 18 - 22db of gain range, rather than today's all-too-common 12db gain preamp. Drive it well and a low listening level on a flea amp can be quite robust tonally and dynamically, within the power the amp can deliver. The congestion people are hearing with too little gain in their signal chain is sometimes coming from the source.

>>The congestion has to do with ease and comes long before you are anywhere close to clipping.<<

Many parameters to consider here. You can listen to flea-power amps that exhibit no discernible midrange congestion on Zu speakers, within natural limits and driven properly. Call up Gerritt and tell him his Yamamoto 45 amp is congested.

>>While Souls eliminate fiddling with gap height (which I like) I fear higher dispersion FRD will require additional room treatment (which I do not). But I have not heard so cannot say.<<

Room treatments. Another typical hi-fi botch. Many treated rooms sound worse than they started. Look, hi-fi isn't supposed to be this difficult. Use normal furnishings, bookshelves with books, blinds, curtains, whatever, to adjust a room. But what natural music performance environment is remotely close to perfect or treated for perfection? A grand total of *none.*

I installed a pair of Soul Superfly in a friend's room that has absolutely zero treatment and they sound sensational without further attention. Dispersion is better and considerabily less directional than Druid, but certainly narrower and without floor/ceiling effects mitigation of Definition. Getting the amp right with Zu speakers trumps by a wide margin anything you can do with room treatments or placement.

>>It is interesting you say Souls are "substantially more lively" than Druid as people went on and one about how lively Druids were. This must by massive hyperactivity. Although they are both rated 101dbW, in practise my Druids sounded like mid to high 90s, so it is possible that Souls are more sensitive even though their "official" rating is the same.<<

Druids, in their moment of sunshine, were a revelation in dynamic aliveness. But Soul is better although I'll say that it took my Druids three years to fully wake up. The efficiency -- or as Zu correctly states, the power transfer -- is the same but the "shove" is different. Shove and prevailing efficiency arent' the same. Two 101db/w/m speakers can differ in transient dynamic aliveness. Soul Superfly improves on Druid in this respect, and it's both an updated driver issue and the full-Griewe implementation in Soul that Druid lacks.

>>If Miklorsmith likes Definitions at 2W all I can say is his tastes differ widely from my own. I would not recommend his path to anyone.<<

Yes and yes. But Mike keeps higher power solid state amps around when he wants to rock out.

Phil

>>... I don't believe many of us actually put the work in...I actually broke out the laser ...<<

Funny. I'm tearing down both of my Zu systems tonight as I'm having custom maple tables delivered for my gear, and the laser is on the coffee table in front of me, ready for its assigned task when I reinstall everything tomorrow.

Phil

Gopher: Good for you, and you are 100% correct, most people including audiophiles do not put in effort.

You can see this clearly here on audiogon. Lots of discussion over what is best $1000 interconnect, no discussion on fact that corner loaded left channel is 3-6db louder than wall loaded right channel. Much of "audiophile" should rename itself "gearfetish".

Phil: It seems you are dead set on setting up potential Soul owner for disappointment. I cannot dissuade you. There is no tone without proper alignment, it is dead. And I will not honor your "loud preamp" argument with response. If you want dead tone with the type of "dynamic" you get with loud pre-amp, and pay $3K+ for pleasure, then please do buy Soul, plops down, and pay flea watt tubes. Phil will appear and try to sell you more stuff.

Audiofeil: Thank you for injecting some reality into discussion!

Suppose you have high power SET with Zu? Like aleph 60? I would like to think problems I have heard with Zu & SET are the obviously inadequate W, not anything to do with topology of SET which I think will work well for speaker.

>>It seems you are dead set on setting up potential Soul owner for disappointment. I cannot dissuade you. There is no tone without proper alignment, it is dead. And I will not honor your "loud preamp" argument with response. If you want dead tone with the type of "dynamic" you get with loud pre-amp, and pay $3K+ for pleasure, then please do buy Soul, plops down, and pay flea watt tubes. Phil will appear and try to sell you more stuff.<<

In fact, no. You do not accurately represent my point of view nor what I wrote, and perhaps you haven't even read it thoroughly.

For you and I, tone can be dialed-in from where it starts with the speaker's and the system's intrinsic qualities. But a non-audiophile music lover can easily avoid what you refer to as "dead" sound or absence of tone. Alignment cannot create tone where it isn't intrinsically present. On the other hand, alignment can improve tone that is already intrinsic to the gear. It's just degrees. You and I might need more because we know it can be extracted. But we're not going to enlarge the community by insisting that everyone must be so precision-oriented to have fun with music via hi-fi. And certainly, that's not what Zu wishes to enforce. I want people to buy the right amp for any Zu FRD-based speaker so they have intrinsic tone, and then they can choose how far they want to go in system optimization themselves. You won't find me recommending endless incremental purchases to reach a goal.

I didn't recommend a "loud preamp." What I wrote explicitly is that some low-power SET amps (not all, and not always low powered) have lower-than-normal total voltage gain. If you pair a low gain preamp with a low-gain power amp, wherein the input sensitivity of the power amp will not allow it to be driven to full power from normal sources via said preamp, you will have more noise, less tone, and "dead" dynamic life. It's not a matter of having a "loud" preamp, but having one with neither too little nor too much gain. Too much gain presents its own problems, but if you don't have enough gain for a particular source to drive the amp to full power, you won't even get those full 2 or 3 watts.

Now, you haven't found me recommending flea-powered amps. Not once. I've written the opposite. 20 - 60 watts is the sweet spot. Although there is a strong argument for McIntosh MC501s or even MC1201s on 101db/w/m Zu speakers. The sense of complete lack of dynamic restriction from 500 - 1200w is sonically valuable if the rest of the amp is right. But, again, there is a group of people whose commitment to a tube (e.g. 45, 2a3, 50) is so firm that what they're really looking for is a speaker than can leverage their amp, rather than an amp that can leverage their speaker. I understand this. Gerritt at Zu loves the Yamamoto A-08 for reasons that satisfy him. There are many others. For that kind of listener, a Zu speaker will perform beautifully, and in fact if you are set on having only 2 watts, Soul Superfly will work better than anything Zu has built to-date.

People who like flea-power in amplification usually arrive there after having had more conventional amp topologies and power levels. So, they know what they are doing. I'm not concerned about the 2 watt crowd, because very few neophytes start their hi-fi evolution with 2w SET. Those that end up with flea power and like it, will be happy with Superfly. It's just not me. I use 25w 845 SET monoblocks on Definitions, and 25w PSET 300B monoblocks on Druids.

Phil