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In Reply to: Zu Druid placement misunderstanding posted by bonesetter2004 on April 18, 2007 at 15:03:07:
I purchased the drivers used in these with the idea of cloning them. The bass unit is a 10" bass guitar driver. After much crossover modeling and cabinet iterations, decided that these would not work for me.
Looking at the full range woofer, it is far from flat, the crossover comes in high and the woofer is run fullrange. After much work I saw a frequency response plot for them, looked a lot like the plots provided by Emminance for the raw drivers.
I suspect the uneven frequency response is part of the allure of these. Peaks and dips CAN make speakers sound faster and more dynamic. Also can make them sound the opposite.
The other issue is the free air resonance of the 10' driver is 45 Hz. This puts a crimp on bass response.
But these seem to be speaker that is greater than the sum of its parts. The 20.00 horn tweeter and 90.00 woofer somehow end making a speaker that is good to listen to, not so great for measurements.
Follow Ups:
I seriously doubt you purchased the same driver.The one Zu uses looks like a certain off-the-shelf prosound driver from a certain eminent prosound manufacturer, but it's not the same unit and doesn't have the same frequency response.
The ones I bought were Legend B102 and APT-30 or something close. Looking, they looked almost exact. The inside of the APT driver looked the same and the surrounds on the Legends looked like them also. THe chrome trim ring on the woofer is needed to front mount the inside mount drivers.
I suspect the drivers in the Druids are modified some. I doubt if the stock will give the same results as the Druid achieves.
The Druid is an interesting design though. I like having one driver to cover from the bottom up to the highs. It is just very difficult to do well.
I agree that the Druid is a very, very interesting design. My understanding is that their widerange driver uses the Legend B102 as a starting point, but it's a vastly more capable driver. For instance, the driver in the Druid is not only about 6 dB more efficient, it also has twice the linear x-max - indicative of a vastly more powerful and capable motor.The enclosure is equally if not more interesting. Back in the late 80's I built some underdamped tuned pipe speakers that went amazingly low, seeming to defy Hoffman's Iron Law - but the trade-off was a deep notch in the frequency response in the upper bass region. The thing was, the notch went undetected until I borrowed some measuring equipment. Being overly obsessive-compulsive (is that redundant?), once I knew the notch was there I couldn't live with it. So eventually I abandoned that type of enclosure. Zu has placed higher priority on a building a speaker that performs well above its price point in several areas, and not worried overmuch about a frequency response anomaly that looks far far worse to the eye than it sounds to the ear. I bet people who haven't seen the infamous Soundstage measurements don't even know it's there. The ear is fairly insensitive to notches.
A year and a half ago I brought to market a speaker that conceptually was sort of like a poor man's Definition. I used a Fostex "fullrange" driver augmented by a built-in subwoofer and a supertweeter. It offered in my opinion a fairly competitive set of trade-offs, but was still limited in how well it could resolve complex music at high volume levels. That's the challenge faced by most full-range or wide-range drivers. Whether the problem is caused by exceeding linear x-max or intermodulation distortion or flux modulation, I don't know. But eventually I went in another direction with my designs because at the time I couldn't find a cost-effective way around this limitation. Since then I think I have found one, but will keep it under my hat for now.
The B102 is a promising-looking driver, but I would try crossing it over below 2 kHz rather than allowing it to run fullrange.
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