Efficient speaker: Zu, Tekton, Volti, Klipsch, Fleetwood?

Zu Soul Supreme can fill your space, despite its size, but Soul 6 will do an even better job, yet it's even more compact. Soul 6, due to using the newer coax driver and the stiff & relatively lightweight cabinet better limiting energy dissipation in the structure, has explosive projection, more spread than Soul Supreme, and it goes deeper once you have the Griewe Gap correctly set for your room. You can get it in 12 colors. WAF tends to be very high.

Equally useful in your room, though with a larger visual presence, is the Omen Def Supreme. It has most of the non-subwoofer benefits of the Definition 4, at much less expense. The dual FRD arrangement further improves horizontal dispersion while limiting floor and ceiling effects. It's a great speaker for dual-purpose cinema / hifi systems.

This assumes you want to stay well under $10,000. Druid 6 equally applies, and in Zu's iconic form factor. Definition 6 is coming. But in the central range of affordability, the Souls and ODS will do a great job for your space and objectives. They are all amp-friendly and room-adaptive, having Griewe internals.

Phil

Ladok,

The Zu Griewe gap is not difficult to adjust if you follow published directions and start at the reference 1/8" gap. Then you can go through a one-time exercise to get it right for your room and you're done. Devore and Zu are different experiences. Every Devore speaker I've heard has discontinuities between driver behaviors, but they become far easier to discern after hearing the coherence and unity behaviors of Zu. If you like the somewhat "rich," euphonic bass of Devore combined with a crossover constriction in the heart of midrange with a tweeter that is faster than the slow midrange driver, then shy away from the top-to-bottom consistency and coherence of crossoverless Zu. Steve Guttenberg flubbed his Soul 6 review. He did it too hastily, didn't work the Griewe Gap properly and got them (Zu's fault) with insufficient burn-in. He should have blasted them for 2-3 more weeks before doing the review. For more current perspectives on well-burned-in pairs, see John Darko's youtube review, and Srajan Ebean's 6Moons recent review. Both took more care in setup than Guttenberg did.

Soul Supreme is a room-friendly, amp-friendly speaker. The Radian 850 supertweeter is silky and the 16 ohms load makes most solid state amps sound cleaner and more musical than lower impedance speakers on same amps. If you use a tube amp without 16 ohm outputs or a SS amp of low power, you can use 25ohm parallel resistors at the speaker inputs to get a net load of ~8ohms.

Soul 6 is vivid, dispersive, room-filling, bass-impressing, despite its smaller size. The main driver and concentric supertweeter have a larger cone of dispersion, and the driver is energetically quick and percussive. The okoume cabinet with underlying superstructure is a champ at energy management and lightweight to boot. Soul 6 is easily the most coherent, unity-behaviors speaker in its price class, but this industry has trained customers to like a lot of low-unity speaker designs, so depending on your frame of reference, you might have to give a Soul 6 or even a Soul Supreme some time for you own mind to acclimate to holistic, phase-coherent sound, or you might love it right off the bat. Or you might not get there and reject it. That's why Zu gives you 2 months to find out. Soul 6 is easy to lift, pack up and return. You can do it all by yourself.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles, you can hear them on my systems.

Phil

Re: Zu Soul 6 -- Steve Guttenberg, as I explained elsewhere here, did a hasty, sloppy review on speakers not fully broken in. And he set up the speakers erroneously before he made the effort to understand them. For a more accurate, informed and thorough third party published assessment, find John Darko's Best of 2021 video review, which he leads with Soul 6. And find & read Srajan Ebean's 6Moons nine pages review published a few weeks ago. If you don't believe me, they will give you a quite decent understand of what to expect. Danny Kaey will also have a review on his Sonic Flare youtube channel, shortly.

Phil