Zu Soul Superfly

>>Placement and room is how your low MF, upper bass, and bass will sound, regardless of amps.<<

Nope, don't agree. Especially with tube amps the range of driver control has a large effect on the full spectrum of low-frequency sound. Lots of minor, non-audiophile ways to mitigate room behavior, but the amp/speaker interface is set and with Zu, no amount of room optimization will change the character imposed by the amp/FRD synergy (or not). With Zu, it overwhelms room factors as a first order priority and driver for what you'll hear.

>>We listen to a combination of speakers + rooms and the industry has yet to create a speaker system that manages rooms in a truly easy way. It would be, I imagine, something with omni bass, plus very directional HF, plus some kind of automatic dEQ. I do not like dipole bass (which can get pretty omni) nor do I like dEQ, but this would be true "plop it down" system. Bose I imagine might have something like this but I have no interest in them either.<<

No one hears music in a perfect room, not even the primary performance. I am close to the investors in Audyssey, and have heard their consumer, commercial and behind-the-scenes developments. They'll "correct" your room. Whether doing so sounds better is debatable. It's not that they don't make the corrections they claim to make, it's what they have to do to the original signal to make them.

I've heard treated rooms, "advanced" acoustics concert halls. All of it disappointing. Anyone old enough to have heard a performance in the allegedly "perfect" for its time Avery Fisher Hall? Despite referencing attributes of Symphony Hall in Boston, BBN hosed the sound. It never really got fixed.

Rooms have acoustic anomalies. They can be mitigated with minor adjustment and normal furnishings. If someone wants to go further, have at it. Not me. There's another way: live within the room. I want hi-fi out in the open living spaces. I want people to be able to relate to it in their own homes. Obsessive audiophilia is knifing hi-fi for a steady bleed-out. Do what you want to optimize your Superfly installation, but don't fear you can't get good sound if you don't. Wire them up; place them logically; start having fun. They work with anything from a $300 HK receiver to $25,000 SET amps to big McIntosh power. It's as worry-free as a speaker gets in 2010. Have fun.

Phil

I contacted zu about possible upgrades to my Mk408 Druids. Sean said the new soul frd would provide more mid presence at the expense of a liitle bass output. 12 ohms vs 16 ohms means my mundorf 1.0 cap and 12 ohm duelund resistor will need to be changed to a Duelund 10 ohm resistor.

So it's worth the gamble...... I think......

The Druids play dynamics like no other.... But I have mini methods filling the bass.

I will see if the wider dispersion of the soul frd interferes with the room. I disagree that the soul bass output will be more true than I have now. My bass is amazing at the moment from 40hz and lower.

Great hobby to be able to do these experiments and hear any results!!!

The comments/experience on this thread are very interesting.

For me Zu have not produced a poor speaker, of the ones that I have owned Druid and Essence and others heard extensively the Presence and Definitions.

The Essence speaker to me is more or less a plonk and play speaker, it can be improved by fine placement, and with my current system is a very good match/balance with the other components, I can just plonk any CD on and really enjoy the music.

My experience with the Druids is that the system components need to be carefully matched, and the speakers do need time investing to get the best out of them (placement). Get the components wrong and you will be chasing the speakers around the room trying to get to the best sound, which IME can never be achieved, believe me I have spent months just doing that. Putting the Essence on the same system resolved some of the problems exhibited by the system with the Druids, but were not a complete fix, changing the system components did provide the solutions to the problems experienced with the Druids and partnering equipment.

I totally agree with Phil's findings re the power amp signature and matching with the Zu speakers, as I have experienced such, if the amp is dark sounding then the Zu speakers will show this, the same can be said of source components, dark sounding CD players IME do not work with the Druids, but are a better match for the Essence.
Zu speakers IME produce what is given to them they do not add or subtract to the music, they are the purest transducer of music that I have come across to date.

There will be times when people will say that they do not like what the speakers are doing, my question to this is "are you sure that it is the speakers, or are they highlighting a problem or less than appropriate matching of source components/amplification?"

Still waiting for the Zu Soul Superfly's to land in the UK, as so far anything from Zu has lived upto expectations.

Phil: Yes -- audessey was what I was trying to remember. I don't know if they have well integrated with any reasonable price floorstander yet. Either way, I have not loved the sound of any dEQ system but this is matter of taste.

It is fine you don't agree about importance of room and placement. Enjoy playing with your amps and preamps. And cables.

Also, listing a bunch of incorrect room/hall treatments says nothing about correct room. There is no shortage of stupidty and consequently bad results in this world.

Curious_george: I think you made very good choice buying Soul speaker. I am very eager to learn what you think when they finally make it to you.

Also please, placement is something you can do more of or less of within constraints, just like everything else in audio. My druids too are in family room with two year old and newborn, they are not in dedicated mancave. (unfortunately).

But still, even within this very domestic environment, they are carefully setup to make most of sweet spot which is in particular spot on couch. And difference in quality has taken me from dissappointing sound to perfectly enjoyable sound. If I move from sweet spot, I get back to dissappointing sound but that is OK for me, it is not bad, just not what I had hoped for given buzz around Zu. So casual listening, speaker just play and I am doing whatever. Active listening, I must be in sweet spot. Sweet spot is only big enough for 1 btw.

Distance from corner and back wall (had to move them closer) improve base. Distance apart (had to move them closer) improve tonal density. Putting on wood base improve base over carpet. millimeter toe-in did wonders for sound stage and HF. Very careful measurement gave me equal SPL both channel, and equal distance from ear (again, millimeter level). My room eats bass, so had to add sub. Positioning that took hours. Then integrated it via careful phase, volume, and digital delay. Did not need first order reflection changes on top, left, and right because of topography for room and fleece blanket over table (easily removed) solved it for bottom.

So there you have it! It is not crazy "audiophile" mancave with zero WAF but perfectly ordinary looking living room with two speakers in them used every day. However, placement of everything is millimeter precise to optimize sound of system and it make big difference. It create tonal quality (which dies off axis in non-optimized spot) and it maximized dynamic (which I still don't love from very expensive Rotel ICE amp). More importantly for all of this, it was through placement that I learn about my system and sound it makes. If you want to understand "tone" then working to optimize for it will teach you more than 100 audigon forum posts.

I know exactly what strengths and weaknesses of my system are, I know exactly why it sounds like it does, and I know exactly what parts of sound are coming from room, coming from speaker, and coming from room/speaker interaction. Therefore, I know exactly what I need to do to improve sound. Gear alone will never give you this insight and knowledge into your own playback. Taking responsibiity of speaker/room interaction is first step of taking ownership over your own sound. It gets you off the gear train, which I personally have no interest in but other people seem to enjoy fetishizing (to each their own).

Avonessence: Looking forward to your review!

Naggots: It is the new FRD I am most interested in. My instinct is not to love wider dispersion but Zu knows what it is doing in FRD so I am very curious.

>>Enjoy playing with your amps and preamps. And cables.<<

Well, I've made no changes in preamps, amps or cables in five years, and that's for two complete Zu/SET systems. I did upgrade my Druids to 4-08 parts and I traded in my Definition 1.5s to get Def 2.0s, to get rid of the MDF cabinet glare in the earlier version. My turntables are 30 years old.

The positioning of my speakers in both systems has not changed since two hours after first installation. There are no room treatments other than the mitigation of normal household furnishings. Meanwhile, by far the best time I spent on audo outside of listening to music in the past 25 years was the solid week of investigation of coupling, isolation and general resonance control I was able to carve out last year.

Of several families of options, explored in combinations and in isolation, what came out on top? If you use a turntable, placing it on cones in turn resting on Aurios media bearings will be a revelation. The improvement exceeds any cartridge and tonearm upgrade I've ever done, by a wide margin. If you use a digital disc player, magnetic levitation (when space and low player weight render it feasible) drives more improvement than upgrading to a player 10X the price of the one you have. When the player is too heavy for that, go with Aurios Classic media bearings or similar. THESE were the vivid, dramatic improvements, once Zu speakers were in place.

Point is, by getting the amp/speaker combinations right, my systems have been quite stable in configuration as well as where I placed them. The one area of changeout has been digital players. The other area of interest prompting acquisition is analog, for which I indulge in more phono cartridges that I actually need.

A speaker designer and maker (not Zu in this case) visited me after I got Zu speakers and revamped my amplification. He looked at my systems and after registering his objections about having coffee tables in the listening area of each system, and lamenting the presence of flat panel TVs, he asked me how I arrived at my speaker placement. I told him the truth. I bought Zu shortly after moving into a new house. I looked at the rooms, and on visual assessment identified where the speakers would go both for best sound and functional compatibility with each room. I also showed him how far I'd moved the speakers from their initial position during the first hour listening. There was less than three inches of movement in any direction, from first plop down.

He said he was sure he could do much better if I'd allow him to. I marked the floor with masking tape to reference the original position and let him have at it. He was competent and he makes good speakers. We ended up back in the same spots, he admitting that I had already found the right and best locations for the rooms. Of course I knew this when I let him indulge his confidence. Now, I've been doing this for decades and have moved around a lot, faced with having to sort many rooms as a result. I also once worked in the business and sorted placement for many customers. But I've never found it even remotely difficult, time-consuming or esoteric in any way. Live with the room and appreciate its voicing. Tone is intrinsic to the gear or it's not there at all. You can get tone from a jail cell if the gear is toneful to begin with. Put another way, you can hear when a guitar player has achieved exceptional tone in acoustically unfavorable circumstances -- and they're almost all acoustically unfavorable. You can hear it walking down Sixth Street in Austin almost any night before you even enter a room. Zu speakers are like that. They have intrinsic tone under even the worst circumstances.

My time spent on hi-fi now is almost all music listening rather than gear futzing. Druids were easy for me to sort out, with respect to amplification. With Definitions I willingly ran through five months of experimentation before settling on 845 SET. After that, all set. Here's one thing you can count on: from the best sound you can get from your new Zu speakers in the first three days, everything will meaningfully improve for the next two years if you do nothing more than play music.

I've been spending my own money on hi-fi for 40 years now and the most significant thing about Zu speakers is that they arrested the search for better sound and eliminated the frustrations of audiophilia, with the result that I've bought more music in the last five years than in the prior 20. I think Soul will make this true for many others. Given its compact size, price, amp-friendliness and low-tweak set-up, after a single astute amp choice within your budget (or perhaps you already own one), music will regain its rightful claim on your money and time spent on audio.

Phil