I just purchased some new Druids. I felt the same way about tonal issues. Mine seemed to have no headroom, rolled off in the high frequencies, and imaged weird. I played them for 7 days straight at moderate listening levels. I then spoke to Sean, who was awesome and extremely helpful. Zu certainly ranks as the one of the best when it comes to customer service. I went back and played with the speaker placement. BINGO! These things really need equal distance between speakers and listener, with extreme toe in pointed directly at the listener. Now I'm happy as a clam. They are still breaking in, but they now have astonishing imaging and perfect tonal balance. Keep breaking them in and playing with the listening position. I imagine that the Tones are affected by stand height as well, since the height of the Druids as determined by the spikes is critical. An interesting point that I learned from Sean is that he worked on the design of the Talon Khorus with Thierry Budge. I owned that speaker, and it's placement, break-in, and tonal issues were very similar to the Druid, which is why the first versions were so controversial.
Zu Tone/Druid Tonal Anomalies
I like to hear anyone with Zu speakers if they have had a similar problem. I recently acquired a pair of Zu Tone speakers. Certain aspects about them are very good, such as soundstaging and speed, but it seems to me that unless my pair are defective, there is a serious issue with tonal accuracy. Right away when I set them up, I noticed that they sounded quite hollow. I then made a lot of measurements, both close miked and at the listening seat, with both a Behringer DEQ2496 and an RS sound level meter (using both pink noise and frequency generation). In both cases, it fairly closely matches what I am hearing, which is a severe rise in the upper midrange. I am trying to use a Z-Systems RDQ-1 digital EQ device to correct this problem, and have gotten much closer to a natural tone and flatter curve. What this required was a 7.6 db cut centered at 1.4kHz at a width of 1.5 octaves. This is quite a cut! For reference, I've had two other sets of speakers (Monitor Audio GR60 and NHT ST-4) in the room at almost exactly the same position, neither of which had this problem. I spoke to Sean Casey at Zu about the problem, and he thought it might be room interaction, which might be true to a point, but the anomaly is just too severe, and makes this point less viable since my other speakers didn't show the problem. I noticed in another thread here, that a couple of people heard what seemed like a similar problem with the Druids.
I am very curious as to what others have experienced with any of the Zu speakers in this regard.
Thanks,
Stew
I am very curious as to what others have experienced with any of the Zu speakers in this regard.
Thanks,
Stew