Decision between Zu Definition OR VS DB99

I haven't heard the VS DB99s. And specs seem sketchy. I own Zu Druids and Zu Definitions in two different systems, placed in two different rooms, but I have directly compared both Druids and Definitions in the same rooms, using each system and moving the required speakers around. So I can answer some of the matrix of questions here.

A little preamble: The DB99 is described as a 3-way, implying that it uses passive crossover elements in the signal path to all the drivers. If this is true, it would likely be the primary weakness compared to the Definition. Until I got Druids and then Definitions, I had not ever heard a full-range-driver-based speaker that I could also describe as being tonally accurate or natural. But once you get the combination of full-range driver + tonal accuracy, the presence of a passive crossover -- even in speakers I formerly enjoyed -- is very hard to accept ever again. A crossover just asserts itself, squeezing life out of the music and disintegrating the holistic sound you've now become accustomed to. It's that holistic difference that SET adherents cite over push-pull amps, made large. Obvious. Anyone can hear it. We've all been living with this limitation for eons and now we don't have to. The holism and tone of the Zu designs is the first reason to make the effort to consider them.

Certainly the VS and the Zu Def are evenly matched as marketed items, costing close to the same, having pretty much the same design objectives, and consuming very similar footprints.

How does one describe a Zu speaker to someone who hasn't heard one before? It's a fully integrated, holistic sound. As a former Quad ESL owner, Druids most remind me of what was compelling about Quads -- intimacy, quick & uniform transient behavior, excellent octave-to-octave balance, beautiful tonal accuracy. But they add true dynamics and high sustained SPLs on very little power. You have huge latitude for amplifier preferences, everything from 2 watt 45s to McIntosh solid state monster monoblocks. No worries.

As usual, someone speculates that the Zu FRD must beam problemmatically. This is not a practical issue. The 10.5" FRD rolls off naturally at 12kHz and its directionality is much less constricted than a Quad ESL-57, and somewhat more than, say, an Anthony Gallo or a Spendor S3/5. I have one system on the short wall of an oblong room and the other system on the long wall of a less oblong room. I have absolutely zero seating positions where I cannot maintain a dimensional soundstage with convincing frequency response. And the swet spot is a good 3 bodies wide for Druids and more for Definitions.

The Definition is specifically designed to reduce floor and ceiling effects and improve horizontal disperson over the Druid, partly as a nod to mixed-use (video HT / serious music) systems. The MTM array on front, while not strictly a D'Appolito configuration by the placement math, acoustically controls the upper mid and treble response of both the FRD and the super-tweeter. Here, in any practical domestic room I can imagine, beaming is simply not in evidence and dispersion is both quite unlumpy and controlled for excellent practical use. The Definition is easy to set up and pretty much a drop-in for an existing system, from which point you may wish to re-optimize based on your inevitably new satisfaction criteria.

Again, absence of crossover is a commanding, compelling attribute. As I've written before, it turns out that when you eliminate crossovers in the meat of the music range, and retain phase linearity, lots of affordable sources are perfectly fine. I think a lot of what audiophiles have been wrestling with in endless upgrades has been traceable to the "pinhole" effects of crossovers being assigned to dissatisfaction elsewhere in the system. My point is, if you get any Zu speaker and are the type of person to put 40% of your system funds into your disc player or TT/TA/Cart, you will want to stop that right now and realize that the fulcrum of fidelity in your system has just moved to the power amp. With Zu speakers in place, your power amp selection will now have the largest effect on your system other than moving further up the Zu line or finding something else to exceed them.

As for playing loud, any Zu speaker is up to the task of caving your skull in, if you ask it to. Even Tones. Druids can put you awash in cell-squashing SPLs in normal rooms, on a relative handful of watts. Don't underestimate what one Zu FRD can load a room with. The Griewe model in the tower gives you quick, tuneful, articulate and full bass down to a little below 40Hz before it smoothly rolls off. The Druid is deceptively simple, but compared to most speakers, scales just fine.

One look at Definitions and you expect them to scale. They do. That 16Hz - 40Hz range missing from the Druids? There are 4 ten-inch light-paper-cone drivers fed by an in-built amp to take care of that. The lower range is present and accounted for as claimed, but unlike the vast majority of subwoofers and other deep-bass speakers on the market, this array on the back of each Def does more than indistinctly rumble and slop around. It retains the speed and articulation that are hallmarks of the main drivers. The dual FRDs perhaps sacrifice some of the Druid's ultimate focus and single-driver intimacy, but they burst with startling realism, projecting sound into the room multidimensionally and laying out a soundstage as captured in the recording. They do, in my experience, require at least 9' - 10' of listening distance for the soundfield to fully integrate in your mind, compared to the Druids which can be used relatively near-field. Of the recording is up to it, you will feel the power of a full symphony orchestra in your skeleton. The SACD of DSOM will be clean and clear right up to the dynamic limits of your room. Definitions live up to their name, being stellar in their ability to keep simultaneous sounds and musical events distinct as density, intensity and SPLs rise.

In Zu speakers you can find both truth and beauty. As even Zu admits, the Druid is less perfect than the Definition, which is why there's a Definition. The Druid is discernibly less linear as you'd expect being less than 1/3 the cost of the Definition, but has superior small-scale intimacy. It is a seductive, beguiling speaker and a true revelation the first time you experience it. I'll suggest further that in your home is the very best way to have your first Druid or Zu experience. The retains compelling if not-quite-Druid intimacy, and improves everything else across the board. These are not euphonically colored speakers. Definitions in particular are ruthlessly revealing of any hash, grain, or general unpleasantness elsewhere in a system. Get the power amps right for your purposes and everything else is pretty easy to sort out. Pianos will sound correct. vocals will include the person instead of being disembodied. Dynamics and transient uniformity will be responsive to the music and you will hear an aliveness to performances that is seldom achievable in home audio.

Certainly, there are many people who revere the VS DB99, citing some of the same attributes. Different people are sensitive to different properties in our highly imperfect devices for sound reproduction. What I can see about the VS online does not give me confidence it can achieve the holistic sound of Zu that is vital to me, but I'd have to know more and hear them to be sure. Here's what we do know: with a Zu speaker today, your amp signal goes to the driver(s) producing the 40Hz - 12kHz range without passing through a crossover network. No RC. That FRD rolls off naturally on both ends, and the supertweet rolls in on a simple filter. Do you hear the holistic sonic character made possible by that, without giving up real highs and bass? If so, you're likely to prefer Zu. If not, your preference may drive a different outcome to your decision.

Since owning Zu speakers, I've had more moments of being startled by a moment of "live" sound, than in all the previous 30 years I've been buying audiophile-grade gear.

Phil

Thank you MJ, and you're welcome too. As is the case with many good ideas that come from small companies, lack of awareness limits the rate at which Zu finds its rightful place in the market. The company is small, and clearly has very limited funds for promotion. Talking to Sean and Adam, I get the impression that aside from supporting its workers, whatever money Zu makes gets quickly ploughed back into the business. It's hard to raise money for hifi manufacturing from a standing start so these guys bootstrapped the company and are exporters. I am sure there's very little left for marketing. Clearly 2005 has been a breakthrough year for Zu, with exposure in 6moons.com especially helping to energize interest in the company and products. They've been building interest in Asia faster than here on product quality and word-of-mouth, fueled by the high-purity school of SET-oriented Asian audio.

As you can see from some reactions here and elsewhere online, Zu's speakers and its FRD are disruptive to a lot of accepted practice and perception in hifi. The last hifi product I've seen elicit so many "it can't work" pronouncements from people who never got within a hundred miles of the actual device was David Gammon's Vestigal Tonearm at Transcriptors in the 1970s. It's partly because of that very low-mass, low-wear arm that I have vinyl discs today that are eminently playable 30 - 40 years after purchase. With a Denon moving coil, too. But of course, it couldn't work with anything other than a high-compliance Shure V15 or ADC XLM, everyone who never heard one said. That reminds me...I think I'll go get mine from my gear closet and put it back on my turntable. Then I'll have two "it can't work" items in my Druids system; one at each end!

I didn't know it at the time I bought my Definitions in March, but they were only beginning to be shipped into the market. The Druid has had more time to motivate the market. The depth and velocity of word-of-mouth awareness of Zu is beginning to amount to something. I've seen this before in hifi, companies beginning small and getting sales traction before they could promote or find mass distribution: Advent, about 1969. The original early '70s Mark Levinson. Nakamichi around 1972/3. Ariston, Linn & Rega around 1974-78. Dahlquist, Koetsu, Nagra, Infinity. Apogee in the '80s. The SET revival making its way from Japan to Europe and the US without mainstream press support and before the WWW. More recently 47 Labs, Red Wine Audio, Omega, Cain & Cain and Zu.

All of these companies and movements made a lasting conceptual contribution to the industry and forced people to question accepting some of their thinking about what makes good hifi. But Zu speakers in particular seem to polarize people before they hear them. It looks like a 2-way but it's not quite. It uses a full range driver but it's not a "referenceable" Lowther, Fostex or something else already in the club. It's a 101db/w/m speaker that can handle several hundred watts of amplification. It's supposed to beam, honk, shout, be less efficient than rated, and have no bass whatsoever, but sadly for skeptics it fails to honor any of those obligations.

Phil

Uh...Tireguy...

If you read my text about the DB99, you'll see an IF, as in "If this is true, it would likely be the primary weakness compared to the Definitions." The "if" refers to whether the DB99 is a true 3-way with a passive crossover in the mid. I have enough experience with this to be able to outline my areas of doubt. It's not narrow-mindedness and in fact I repeatedly make reference to the need to hear the VS to be sure, and still accept that someone prioritizing things differently than I do might prefer the VS even if there's a crossover bigger than your head separating the signal to the drivers.

What I would like to know that I haven't found so far is a spec on the DB99's crossover frequencies, for that would tell me quite a lot about the nature of the beast and whether my "if" should be a "will".

Zu's specs are sketchy to some people in some respects. I don't buy speakers on specs alone so I don't care. They could be more thorough however, for marketing purposes. But in the realm of loudspeaker specs, it is peculiar for a company to describe a model as a three-way without listing the crossover points. That's the only thing I'm looking for.

Phil

Well, Jack, in fact crossovers have always been blatantly in evidence and intrusive to me, so I have no reason to expect that I won't hear it in the DB99. What's changed is that the ABSENCE of a crossover in the middle in Zu's speakers has made my prior acceptance of crossover attributes moot. I haven't ever heard a speaker with a crossover, in over 30 years of listening, where it was anything other than a necessary evil. So I'm sensitive to that and have lived with it. Now I don't have to and neither do you or anyone else if you choose not to. The thing is, we've all heard speakers stuffed with crossovers. Not many have heard tonally accurate speakers with 16Hz - 22kHz or better range, and lots of dynamics, with no crossover in the midrange. So until you hear that and determine whether and how that absence affects your perception of fidelity, you really don't know what it means for you. I don't know whether it will make you want to burn your VS speakers, but it might. I can say that even very simple crossovers like inside Sonus Faber speakers introduce the same kind of deleterious consequences I described.

All I wanted to know was what the crossover points are in the DB99 for the SOLE purpose of understanding whether there is a crossover in the midrange signal path, as with a conventional 3-way, or not, as in a Zu. I gather it's the former from the obfuscation in your post.

If VS has managed to put ten pounds of RC network in the path of the midrange signal and end up with that presence having no negative consequences, then my hat will be off to that company's designers. I'm entitled to my doubts. I had doubts about Zu speakers too, before I heard them. That didn't keep me from appreciating their excellence.

A last thing. I have seen in many threads of these forums that ownership of an item somehow disqualifies someone's objectivity. That's a deeply flawed assumption. We all have been through a raft of equipment changes. Most audiophiles show very little loyalty to anything they buy. McIntosh or ARC brand-loyal consumers excepted. Truth is, I have the means to churn if I want to. If a speaker out-innovates Zu and delivers a significant leap in performance over what I have, I am fully willing to write its praises, whether or not I choose to make a change. This is experiential for me, not ideological. I have simply described Definitions for the original poster, and answered some other questions that arose in the thread, and gave some guidance as to what to look for in VS when comparing the speakers. If you read carefully, you will see that I was comparing Zu speakers to what is generally experienced with otherwise good speakers that use passive crossovers in the conventional way. With respect to the VS speakers, the requisite 'ifs' were present and accounted for.

Phil

At RMAF I think I would not have liked Definitions either. The reason being that the room was too small to allow enough distance between the speaker and the listener. If you're too close to Definitions, your perception of tonal balance will be torqued by unintegrated treble energy. As I described in prior posts, I recommend people buy Definitions only if their listening position allows 10' or more of linear distance from the face of each speaker; 9' might be OK. There may be room and power amp factors that could be adjusted to make closer listening just as satisfying, but I haven't found them. The disparity between reaction to the Druids and the Definitions at that show pretty much bears this out. I've never taken any hotel demo very seriously. At the VTV show here in SoCal, I really didn't hear any convincing sound from anyone at the show, but in a relative sense the Druids were fun to listen to and the crowds seemed to enjoy them. So, it surely is understandable, Jack, that the first time you heard Definitions wasn't convincing to you.

If the DB99 were described as a design eschewing any crossover elements in the midrange signal path, I'd be motivated to go out of my way to hear them. But with a crossover in the signal path of the midrange, it becomes just another speaker, perhaps nevertheless worth hearing when I can. However, the consequences of a crossover are not going to change. They can only be ameliorated. For example, I used to like a Sonus Faber Cremona and Amati. But in the context of a crossoverless Zu speaker existing in the market, they are no longer interesting or satisfying for me. Curiously, no one has yet answered my question about the crossover points of the DB99.

No one has so far contested my assumption the DB99 has a crossover in the signal path to the midrange. Which tells me the DB99 is an attempt to build a better speaker on conventional architecture. OK, as conventional architecture speakers go, it might be very good. However, frankly, that approach hasn't yielded much progress recently and I've been at this long enough for it to have become a dead-end. Anyone considering both speakers should understand what they're really comparing. If, fully informed, their decision is in favor of the VS over Zu, I have no argument with that and wish them the best.

Phil

Show hotel listening conditions are compromising to every piece of gear exhibited, but are especially challenging to loudspeakers. I've heard Zu at 3 shows and while they were more than competitive relative to other speaker exhibitors under the same conditions, the sound available in the peculiar floated construction of hotel buildings was not more than a fraction of what's attainable at home.

Zu has sometimes exhibited with speakers that were not fully broken in, and during the break-in period, there is definitely some peakiness to midrange tones that levels out. That trace of horn-like shout you can hear when brand new, is real and disappears.

MJ mentioned that he thinks the Definition has a more solid-state-friendly impedance curve. While the Def's impedance curve is smoother over frequency range, most solid state amps will sound smoother and more musical into the Druid's 12 ohm load, though they will be down on power while doing so.

The 38Hz bass performance of the Druids is not dependent on proximity to boundary reinforcement. They will do that in the middle of a room. The boundary that counts is the floor, where the gap spacing for the Griewe model is set. On Mk4 Druids, Sean specs a CD jewel case thickness worth of gap. Tiny deviations up or down from that make significant differences. On older Druids, that gap should be about doubled. Narrowing the gap will make the bass drier and tonally less rich. Widening it will soften bass definition and introduce a fatter bottom. Amp characteristics can be countered with some slight tuning.

I agree with Duke that the absence of crossover likely has benefits additional to the ones I've previously cited as being obvious, but in general a crossover speaker sounds regressive after hearing the octave-to-octave consistency of Zu.

Phil

No doubt, home trial to decide whether to keep a $9,000+ purchase consisting of two 120 lbs. columns is a marketing inhibitor to Zu finding its maximum audience. But if they go through a dealer channel, say goodbye to the $9,000 entry price, and the $2,800 tag on Druids too. If the burden of boxing speakers you decide not to keep is daunting, then perhaps a quick flight or drive to Zu HQ can get your confidence in the ballpark. Also, a little diplomatic asking might get you into the home of one of a Zu owner.

Very few people will return the speakers if they put in the time. The bigger issue is that putting something so revealing and present into an existing system can have unexpected consequences to how you perceive the quality of the rest of your gear. Especially power amps. With a Zu speaker in place, the power amp becomes the critical driver of fidelity, assuming you have at least merely competent sources.

Phil