Anyone tried (and not liked) single-driver horns?

[codhead]

[TBrennan]

I've heard single-driver rear-horns sound both good and bad.

I've heard a couple of Lowther Medallion systems sound quite good as well as Lowthers in another tall rear-horn, the name of which escapes me now.

On the other hand two of the worst systems I ever heard were single-driver rear-horns; one was the undersized, so-called "The Horn", a commercial product that makes Magnavox TV speakers sound like Khorns. Another was a huge DIY rearhorn pair a friend of a friend built; it used Fostex drivers and sounded very shrill and bass-shy, like a LaScala but more trouble to build.

Note that IME some Fostex full-range drivers sound very good and some sound very bad; one can't generalize about them.

I was recently using Fostex FX-120s in knock-up cardboard enclosures and they sounded not bad. I'm sure that mounted in open baffles and augmented with a sub they'd be pretty good.

[codhead]

[TBrennan]

Cod---Keep in mind that rear-horns such as yours are actually direct-radiators over most of the range, not horns. Most such speakers only act as horns below 200hz or so. (Note too that most of the rear-horns used have mouths FAR too small to give good bass, many are more in the nature of resonant pipes than true horns.)

So that means they'll have the same problems with dynamics and distortion as any other small diameter direct-radiating cone.

And note that by their nature single-drivers have poor bass and poor highs. People that like single-drivers like them despite their lows and highs, not because of them.

Anyway if you don't like them don't worry about it, there's no perfect speaker and no agreement about what sounds good; a speaker that one audiophiles loves will be despised by another. There's nothing you are supposed to like.

[Painful Reality]

----------------

On 3/27/2005 11:32:01 PM TBrennan wrote:

People that like single-drivers like them despite their lows and highs, not because of them.

----------------

I would say that most guys like them because of the lack of crossover and their resultant coherency. But it comes with a price.

[Klewless]

Tom,

"There's nothing you are supposed to like."

That's a good one! Best summation I've seen in a long time.

[franczyk]

I would imagine that the single drivers would be terrific at imaging.

I bet the klipsch sound has spoiled you. Since Klipsch are known for being good sounding at very low volumes, so maybe Klipsch is the best choice for a bedroom system. The trick I guess would be finding a Klipsch speaker that has a small enough size to fit nicely in a bedroom.

Here is a question for you: Does your bedroom have proper corners? :-)

[seti]

The Abby's don't appear to be that small perhaps some cornwalls would rock the bedroom.

I was about to purchase some abbey's on audiogon but the same day I was contacted by a seller regarding some Belle's. Thank god.

[ZAKO]

I tried a pair of JBL LE-8T full range speakers in a small simple C horn back wave enclosure for awhile. It still needed a small super tweeter To open things up. I got tired of the single driver quest. If any one is interested in the LE-8T speakers (less cabinets) Ill be glad to let them go.(at a small cost)

[dbflash]

What amp are you using?

I heard SET was the way to go with these speakers.

This is interesting because I was looking at getting a pair, but now I'm not sure.

I know Kev13 is using a pair now. Maybe he will chime in.

Also are you using the standard pair or the near field?

Thanks,

Danny

[sunnysal]

not to sound too pompus BUT those are specialty speakers not general purpose speakers. by this I mean that they can sound great with some music and weak with others. I have tried a bunch of cabinets for my Fostex "full range" (should be called extended range) FE208Sigma speakers and always found the same thing; no low end response, great midrange and lower treble repsonse and a laid back upper treble...cello concerto? great! led zeppelin? ugh! if you want a highly efficent speaker to run 80hz (generous IMHO I see little below 100hz) to 12-14khz (15-18khz would be generous to them) at modest volumes in small rooms, they can sound great. otherwise look to something using multiple drivers...tony

[Audio Flynn]

Fort a cheap experiment in a small package the Moth Audio single driver tower sounds OK plus.

It is an acquired taste.

Certaily 100hz to 14,00hz is the expected range.

[Klewless]

As an experiment,

I'd be tempted to buy two Klipsch center channel speakers for a small bedroom, and stand them on end. Small footprint.

[codhead]

[codhead]

[playntheblues]

Here are some Zu Druids which are getting rave reviews. They come with a 60 day full money back guaranty. I am VERY close to buying a pair just to check them out. Here is the link

http://www.zucable.com/druid/index.html

Here is what one of their owners (Druid owner not Zu company owner) wrote me in an email, if nothing else it is very interesting.

"Guy,

I am familiar with most ot he speakers you listed (though can't claim experience with your specific K-horn driver mods), as well as the outstanding KR 320 amp. I run a currently unmodded Denon 3910 myself (am still considering which mod to get -- I'll be interested in what you think of the Exemplar mod). Looking at your speaker history, my guess is our respective paths of audio evolution have different points of origin but have been leading to a common objective.

To understand my comments on the Druids, some brief background: 30 years ago I was in the audio business while in college, graduate school and my first few years of full-time work. Beginning in 1974, I was retailing at the birth of what we think of as "high-end" today. I made my bones in audiophilia in the 70s selling Audio Research SP3a-1 preamps and D-76a power amps, early Linn-Sondeks with SME or Decca tonearms and Koetsu, Denon 103 and Decca cartridges, Dahlquist DQ10 speakers, KLH 9 electrostats, Magneplanar Tympanis, Advents and double Advents, Rogers LS3/5as, Revox, Tandberg and Nakamichi tape decks, the first Sequerra FM tuners. Also Crown, Mark Levinson, DB Systems, last of the US-made Marantz electronics.

I also grew up close enough to Philadelphia to have regularly attended Philadelphia Orchestra concerts when I was a kid, when Eugene Ormandy was still conducting, and later lived in the Boston area for 10 years where I had a share of season tickets for the Seiji Ozawa Boston Symphony in the incomparably good-acoustics Symphony Hall. Plus at this point I am a 37 year guitar player. I've built my own tube amps in the past and have many friends on the vendor side of the business. In short, I've been immersed in music from many perspectives my whole life. That doesn't make my perceptions more correct than someone else's, it's just context for understanding how I hear things and prioritize what I hear, since everything in the repro chain is highly imperfect.

My past speakers in my music systems (not counting video) have been, in order of ownership, Large Advent > Dahlquist DQ10 (further modified) > double LS3/5a > Quad ESL57 > single LS3/5a > ProAc EBS > Meridian M20 > single LS3/5a > Spendor S3/5 > Silverline SR16 > Zu Druid. Add to that the Zu Definitions that just last week replaced B&O 8000s in my theater system.

Since you have had VMPS, Snell and Gallo, I have to conclude that for much of your audio history you assigned a similar priority to tonal accuracy as me, but with different compromises than I chose. In that respect, I interpret your decision to use K-horns as a real break from your trendline, and instigated by a similar impatience or boredom with the lack of dynamic life in music reproduced through the tonally neutral school of conventional multi-driver speaker design. You may also have become increasingly sensitive to the discontinuities introduced by crossovers and disparate driver types as your listening perceptions became more acute and refined. If these observations are true, then we are not far apart in our reasons for gravitating to Zu.

So, the Druid. The outstanding and immediate advantage of Zu is that their speakers give you absolute uniformity of transient dynamic behavior up and down the frequency range. And then you become conscious that music through Zu speakers is utterly unfatiguing, unlike most hi-fi sound. The full-range driver is fast and powerful, and since its reach extends well above 10kHz, it functions full-range without any kind of crossover network. Its rolloff is acoustically controlled, and the supertweeter's simple high-pass filter smoothly blends in for frequency extension and air. Compared to your Klipsch, you should perceive the treble character of the Druid as being more open, flatter, more neutral and quicker. You will not hear the enclosure in the way you can in the K-horns.

In bass, you will appreciate the transient speed and definition of low frequency information. The speaker does not seem bass-shy to me, but a ProAc EBS has been the most bass-worthy speaker I've owned, along with the original Advent. I am not a fan of subwoofers, again for their discontinuity and lack of details, not to mention unnecessary complexity in the system. So for me bass character and quality if much more important than having the full measure of the last octave or two. My Druids are on the short wall of a 24' long room which supports deep bass nicely. I think it is fair to say that Druids will not match the sheer bass power and depth of your K-horns but they will not seem anemic. They will sound more defined and the texture of a specific bass instrument's characteristics will be more palpable than your Klipsch can deliver. You will have high-definition bass by comparison. How you VALUE that quality is something I can't estimate without knowing more about you.

You definitely do not have to (or want to) use Druids in corners. They are remarkably tolerant of placement restrictions imposed by decor, practical living arrangements, spouse acceptance factors, etc. And they will reward you for some effort to futz with placement to dial in imaging and tonal linearity. If you want Klipsch-like efficiency and dynamic life, in a tonally more neutral speaker with more uniform transient behavior up and down their tonal range, and to be liberated from corner placement, Zu speakers are the ticket. They certainly will be an excellent match for your amp!!!

In general, I advise against any of the high-driver-count line array speakers. They can make a good initial impression and certainly project a scaled sound. But amp requirements are in the hypersphere and it is only a matter of time before all the tiny sample-to-sample inconsistencies in the multiple drivers conspire to induce listening fatigue and disappointment in the gargantuan, aggregate purchase. But that's me.

Below, I am adding excerpts from my initial emails to Sean regarding the Druids after I first received them. Please excuse any typos as they were stream-of-consciousness tappings just to get what I was hearing out of my head. But 3 points in closing:

1/ Spring for Zu's Ibis cable. It is one of very few speaker cables that clearly improve sound across the board rather than just make things sound different. It's effect with Druids is especially palpable.

2/ The first 2 minutes or so that you listen to Druids, they will sound "wrong" to an ear conditioned by mainstream high-end hifi. This speaker is designed for transient consistency and phase linearity first, with tonal accuracy just behind (in my opinion -- Sean might say otherwise). The ABSENCE of all the phase twisting and segragated driver dynamic behaviors in most multi-way speakers with passive internal crossovers is startlingly "wrong" until your mind adjusts to the sheer coherence of the sound. When new, they also require patience during break-in. Zu says something like 200 hours. But really in both the Definition and the Druid, my experience is that the character changes are dramatic and rate of improvement is seriously rapid during the first 2 or 3 CDs and after that while things get better, you're pretty much there.

3/ The Definition speaker will fully address all your concerns at a higher price, owing to its integral, powered, rear-facing, 4-driver sub-bass array. But if you need to keep your spend in line, the Druid should do nicely as long as you are willing to risk some difference from K-horn bass characteristics to get the upside of Zu's bass quality. The Definition is stunning, but it doesn't shame the Druid. On the contrary, it makes you realize how much you are getting in the Druid at 1/3 the price.

I hope this helps you with your decision. I have no financial interest in Zu. Just having come to do business with them, I am interested in the success of people making real contributions through original thinking. If you would like to have a phone conversation, let me know and we can arrange a call over the weekend or Monday. Where are you located? I am in Southern California. Excerpts from emails to Zu follow below.

Phil

Phil Ressler

EXCERPTS:

".....The Druids arrived Monday and I got to spend an hour with them last night.

First, they look sensational in the red automotive finish. They are big without being overbearing in size and my wife loves them. Very dramatic presence for what is essentially a tall box.

The sound is very different from any speaker I've owned in the past. It is a total rejiggering of the balance of compromises one must make in choosing a loudspeaker by fidelity criteria. It was a startling change which takes a few minutes to get used to, and then the quality of this experience begins to set in. I am fairly restricted in range of placement for the room I am using them in, but it is a room that intrinsically sounds good with nearly anything, due to favorable proportion and a ceiling that is not parallel to the floor. I had to experiment with spacing width and toe-in to get the horizontal soundstage image to spread across the center but that didn't take long to get right. There's some directional beaming in the upper frequencies from the big whizzer cone but it's mitigated by the supertweeter and the sweet spot has good latitude.

The reports that this speaker is bass-shy.....well, I just don't know what those people are talking about. The thing that really stands out is how the transient attack behavior is very consistent up and down the frequency range. Octave-to-octave dynamic behavior is the best I've ever heard from a coil-and-cone speaker. It's right there with Magneplanars and Quad ESLs, but with far better dynamic range. Bass definition and texture are distinct, palpable and uncommonly satisfying.

There is some midrange tonal color to be accepted to get the sensational dynamics but while this was very noticeable to me in the first 3 minutes or so, it quickly fades as a concern. It's not serious and mostly darkens the midrange some, in a romantic way. It seems to darken a warm and intimate vocalist like Diana Krall. On the other hand, vintage Julie London or Peggy Lee track is open and bright. God love those old vacuum tube consoles and big diaphragm mics! So I'm still sorting out how much of the dark character derives from the speaker and how much is due to the speaker's transparency revealing for better or worse the character of specific recordings. However the dynamics are the best of any speaker I've owned and among the best of any I've heard regardless of price. I had shied away from very high-efficiency speakers in the past because the frequency imbalance trade-off wasn't worth the gain in dynamics. This Druid speaker fixes that.

I never heard 7 watts go so far, either. God almighty, if more people bought speakers like this the market for 300 w/ch amps would go away. A single 300B tube per channel sounds huge! Steven was right, Druids can rock. I put on my DVD-Audio copy of "Hotel California", for instance, and just let it wash over me. The speakers retained definition in the crescendos as added tracks of guitars and percussion were laid into the mix. I'm a 38 year guitar player and notice that string attack is realistic, not artificially accentuated. It's easy for hifi consumers to confuse "hifi" with real sound of real instruments and think the hifi version is more real. This perceptual problem is an inhibitor to adoption of realistically calibrated instruments like your Druids, but its virtue is apparent in each added minute of listening. As good as the DVD-Audio version of Hotel California is relative to the mediocre 1970s recording, on most systems it is at best exciting yet fatiguing. That fatigue aspect of rock through hifi is mitigated or disappears with your speaker.

Because realistic dynamics and balanced frequency response have generally not lived in the same speaker to-date -- at least not at any sane price -- I have generally devoted very few listening hours to orchestral music in my home system. Instead I've preferred to relegate symphonic listening to live performances. I grew up close enough to Philadelphia to have attended many Eugene Ormandy led Philadelphia Orchestra performances as a kid, then the William Steinberg Pittsburgh Symphony during my college years and later still had season tickets at the Seiji Ozawa Boston Symphony all through the 1980s in the incomparable Symphony Hall. These live experiences ruined symphonic hifi listening for me. Even the best systems lost the dynamics, the sound staging and introduced rampant smearing or artificially etched the instruments so the cohesion of the blended sound was lost. Some brief experience already demonstrates to me that an orchestra is worth listening to through the Druids, and for that alone this blind purchase has been vindicated.

Another point in your favor that many people in the industry don't promote is that efficiency in the transducers lowers the threshold of affordability for genuine fidelity. Sure great speakers can justifiably leverage the most ambitious electronics, but they don't have to do so to be convincing. Power costs money out of scale to its benefits and unfortunately completely to the scale of its compromises. There are many modest output amplifiers, both silicon and glass envelop, that are capable of true high-end performance if only their power is made adequate for dynamics. Your design makes it possible for a small amplifier to "add lightness" (as Lotus founder Colin Chapman strived for in sports cars) to the music while putting gravitas within reach of the same. Zu music has feather and weight at the same time.

I am guessing that the Ibis cables will open up the midrange a little further and elevate the treble harmonics in the mix, so I will have more to say when I hear the full intended combination...."

****************

"....Historically, the two big camps have been the dynamicists (think Paul Klipsch) and the accuracy brigade focused on frequency balance (think Henry Kloss). In both camps, there were many practitioners who voiced speakers within an accepted framework of design goals and engineering principles, but mixing of ideas between those frameworks was nearly nil. The SET revival instigated some activity at the border between the dynamicists and the accuracy brigade, but the two worlds still did not meet. The reason is that on one extreme companies like Avant-Garde only addressed frequency accuracy to the extent that materials advances enabled, without really questioning the accepted framework of the dynamicists (ah, a cooler-looking extended range horn!); and the accuracy brigade used materials and manufacturing advances to essentially put the same crossover thinking into a vented box to get 5 or 6 dBs more efficiency (Thiele, Soliloquy, Totem, ProAc, etc.) so the same old sound could be delivered with a smaller amp. This created a stasis of companies fighting the same war over and over, to the point where sometimes even serious listeners chose a camp and then bought the speaker that had the best cabinetry or configuration for their environment.

In evaluating new companies in any business, I always look first for a central insight that drives the company's direction and brand proposition. What I sense from your public expressions and now your actual product is that you are among a very tiny coterie of companies making a serious attempt to integrate the thinking of the dynamicists with that of the accuracy brigade and create a third way. Hence the Griewe box, the proprietary driver, the cables. But instead of just mixing dynamic dogma with accuracy religion, you're saying that in the context of accepting you can't (yet) create a perfect transducer, you can design on the observation that the critical drivers of music fidelity are not what most people think. Instead of dynamic range or octave-to-octave balance (both of which are necessary in reasonable range of acceptance) it is phase accuracy and resolution that are at the apex of deterministic properties for loudspeaker fidelity. This is an insight worth making explicit, and by extension it's worth describing up front that the initial exposure to products born of this idea will be momentarily disorienting to anyone who has owned a component-grade speaker in the past.

Accuracy advocates will immediately distrust their positive emotional response to the music coming from Druids because their left brain will be telling them it "sounds wrong." This impression lasts about 3 minutes, but many snap decisions are made in less time. Soon however, what "sounds wrong" begins to sound right and the qualities that incited a positive emotional response at the first note will begin to be comprehended for their contribution to the music's or the performance's immediacy. It makes you think, especially if you're an experienced hifi consumer. What have I been listening for in the past?

Dynamicists will also suffer some cognitive dissonance during their first few minutes with Druids. The glare from horns and the tizz from Lowther or Fostex drivers that people accept as "exciting" will be absent yet the explosiveness of transients will be evident. It will seem "too accurate" tonally, perhaps a little lean to them especially since the bass will have attack but no sloppy persistence.

We always see that once someone takes the first few steps down a new path, the products derived from that effort are not the very best they can do, and things get even better quickly. I don't know whether you are a cable business experimenting with speakers or you intend to build a speaker-driven firm. But I do know that when a small team begins with an artful insight and they innovate to exercise that insight with persistence in a product, they will build a better speaker, in your case, than the one I just bought. In any case, that choice is yours alone. There are too many ego products in the hifi world, and too many competitors working the same conceptual threads laid down 50 years ago by the progenitors of the business. It has helped that a globalizing world mixed the idiosyncratic Japanese and British notions of sound reproduction with prevaliling American ideas. Now you and a few others are taking this melting pot a step further by rejiggering the priorities for fidelity criteria and building to a new approximation of ideal...."

I hope you all found it at least a good read. Just one persons thoughts. All the best, Guy

[dbflash]

Guy,

Very nice read.

More confused then ever.

I don't have the corners for Khorns at this time. I really like my Cornwalls, but I'm thinking about trying something new.

I will research the Druid.

Danny