ZU OMEN speakers 12ohms??

In most rooms you will be challenged to clip a 35 watt tube amp on the Omens. They are easy to drive and rewardingly great sound too.

Although I don't own a set, I have heard them with our gear and IMO they are the move that ZU really needed to make! Fast, relaxed, detailed, really easy to drive and the bass is really improved over the Druid. I think they look better too.

For the most part, one of our S-30 amplifiers and one of our preamps. For 99% of my listening, I can't clip the S-30 on that speaker. The meter barely moves at all.

We've got customers who have an like the combo a lot, but I've not heard them myself.

Mahughes, no, that is as opposed to the Druid.

Afc, the ZU speakers are all fairly high efficiency. So they encourage the user to use lower-powered amplifiers if they can. An excellent example of this is the Definition, which is 6 ohms. A lot of people want to put a smaller amp on that, because they really don't need the power.

Now with OTLs, you have a phenomena of economy of scale- the bigger the OTL, the more efficient it becomes with low impedance speakers. That is why are larger amps like the MA-1, MA2 and MA-3 can fly in the face of conventional OTL mythology as they can be quite comfortable with 4 ohm speakers.

But smaller OTLs, because of this economy of scale, don't make good power into lower impedances. Normally the ZU speakers are 12 ohms, and almost any OTL made can drive that easily. But 6 ohms... now if you want to use a 30-watt OTL, with that impedance it will play, but it won't sound right.

There was/is a 30-ohm version of the Definition, that plays beautifully with smaller OTLs. And now there are newer ZU speakers that have a switch so you can set that impedance high if you want to, allowing for a lower powered OTL and the speaker to strut their stuff.

No- they like power just fine, as long as the amp has the finesse to not make a fool of itself.

The ZU speakers seem to work better with amplifiers that have a slightly higher output impedance, and the newer models seem like they are more accurate/less forgiving of brightness and sluggish behavior from the amp. So yes, some amps will be revealed in this fashion quite quickly.

So while the speaker does not mind having power at its disposal, it had better be clean power. Its a common experience that smaller amplifiers sound better and in this case the biggest amp you might ever want to put on this speaker might only make 40-50 watts at the most. A lot of bigger amps may not be up to the task.