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Zu Soul Supreme Recap -- Owners, what are your preferred system pairings with them?

I'll save a long backstory, but in short I've got the Zu Soul Supremes and I absolutely love them for what they do, at least in my relatively small (13x15x9) listening room.  I've had them a couple years as a follow-on to previous Zu speakers (Unions and Cubes, which I still own).  Those followed some vintage Altec horns (16 ohm Valencias and 19s)--which I love, but love the Zus more for daily listening.  Sean recommended the Supremes over the Druids at the time for the size of my listening room, although I suspect the Druids would have been as good or better regardless.

My interest is to hear from other Zu Soul Supreme owners...not may posts in this forum from owners that I can find.  I'd prefer to focus this discussion on the Soul Supremes, as there is a lot of great info already on the Druids and Definitions (which I assume are more prevalent in the wild), even though I'm sure have a ton of overlap in system synergy.

So...

What system components are you finding to be great/phenomenal matches to the Soul Supremes, what have you compared them to, and what hasn't worked as well?   Anyone running them with what you consider to be really high-end gear?  I'm super curious to see how far these speakers can go before a speaker upgrade makes way more sense.

Jay
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cat_doorman
236 posts
 

@ladavid I played around with the gap quite a bit with the DW so I already had a pretty good idea where I wanted it when I upgraded to SS. Another surprising improvement was when I went to rubber feet on a platen. I don’t know if it was the decoupling or raising them a few inches off the floor. The gap with the feet is a little high for my taste, but that’s nothing a little cardboard couldn’t fix.

ladavid
79 posts
 

Cat - thanks for telling me about your experience - would be curious how big your gap is - always read too large a gap and your bass gets muddy, even disappears.

I have some Gaia footers that I have used on other speakers - yesterday I had set out to install these on the Supremes.  I have 100 year old wood floors so speakers are a little wobbly on the wood floors - knew the Gaia's wouldn't give me the recommended gap between speakers and floor but thought it might solve the wobble.  Even though there are three post options the Gaia's didn't fit on the Supremes so resorted to playing with gap and tweaking til I got a better foundation on the wood floors.  Still amazed this morning at how different the speakers sound with a 6 mm gap vs 3 mm.  Small change.  What are other Zu owners doing with feet and the gap on their speakers?

I know this thread is mostly about amplifiers so here is what I am using.

Right now have an LTA Ultralinear integrated playing with the Supremes. Great amp but until yesterday I thought it was bass and dynamics challenged.  Think I am re-evaluating that.

Also have nice combo of hot rodded Amp Camp monos and Don Sachs preamp.  Better dynamics but maybe not as much detail.  Plan to swap this combo in the new sounding Supremes in next day or so- curious as I thought dynamics were pretty good before tweaking the gap.

My wife smiles at me and sure she is thinking I have too much time on my hands...

 

 

 

cat_doorman
236 posts
 

I agree that the feet by themselves leave way too much gap, about 20mm (13/16”). I put cardboard shims between the floor and the bottom of the speaker to reduce the gap. Zu has a template in their DIY section, but it isn’t difficult to figure it out on your own. The gap under mine is about 8mm, but sometimes I second guess myself and use 2 shims instead of 3, opening the gap up to 12mm at least for a little bit. 

azookey
4 posts
 

@cat_doorman could you share a picture of your shims. I’ve always found this concept confusing and I’ve never actually seen what they look like. 
 

thanks

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