Zu Druid questions

What is the value of all this speculation about whether of not the Druid design should work? It clearly works for a lot of people. "Science Says" is a fun game for awhile for a certain sort of person but the proof is in the listening.
I have no expertise in speaker design but I have wondered if the unusually short excursion of the full range driver could explain anything about the success the Druid enjoys. The driver movement is not visible until you reach very high listening levels and then only slightly.
Also, why should the diameter of the driver be a limiting factor? The QUAD 57, to which I hear the Druid compared sometimes, has a much larger radiating surface. Does it also defy the calculations of our critics? Or does it also benefit from very short excursion? Is it transitional speed that benefits both in defying projections that should limit them?
Maybe it is possible that Zu started out with a design that should not be able to work and manipulated it in such a way that it works quite well. I don't know their secrets but I remember being told that they took old technology and found ways to improve upon it using modern tools and materials. Maybe they did that. Maybe not. Still, the speaker is a marvel and deserves investigation. If it turns out you don't like it, you will have had some fun experimenting and you will be able to provide us with an educated and informed opinion.

Bob_reynolds, you are exactly right.. pretty little hardware, big snake like power cables... much is just marketing hype in the audiophile world, that is the good thing about Zu actually as you point out,, They are directly derived from the PRo arena and concepts used in live pro equipment, and the designs use Pro drivers, designed for a purpose period, without all the extra frills and correction circuitry needed with mainstream audio drivers. But of course they had to break down and start adding pretty colors, machined custom plates etc, to look like a hi end product, but all the money is put in the right place with Zu designs, the Performance, reliability, and sound.

I don't really understand audiophiles belittling science. That's like people who eat belittling agriculture.

Now there are discrepancies between commonly used measurements and subjective preference, but that's hardly a secret. The applicable term is "psychoacoustics", and guess what - it's a science.

If a product works and sounds good, it's because somebody got the science right.

Duke

As an analytical chemist for over 25 years, I know that there are many measurements one can make of a system, be it a chemical system, a biological system or a sound system, and that we do not have measurements that explain every phenomenon precisely. Measurements are useful to describe certain aspects of a system, but rarely do they descibe a system fully. We do the best we can with our existing tools and try to invent new ones to make the measurements the existing tools can't. New tools such as informatics and chemometrics allow us to take many seemingly disparate measurements and synthesize them into a representation of what is truly important about a system - for example, one can take measurements of a person's blood, breath, urine, etc. that are fairly useless in and of themselves and through some chemometric data treatment actually diagnose that person's health, and what diseases they may be susceptible to.

As a Zu Druid owner, I know that the published measurements seem to show something that should sound pretty bad, but the Druids absolutely SING to me. Perhaps we need some new measurements, or some ways to treat the data from the old measurements so that we actually determine the true capabilities of the system.