>>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
