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
smeyers

Showing 1 response by drubin

These things really need equal distance between speakers and listener, with extreme toe in pointed directly at the listener.
Does this mean the Druids are decidedly a one-person speaker?