Zu Druid questions

Bob_reynolds, you are exactly right.. pretty little hardware, big snake like power cables... much is just marketing hype in the audiophile world, that is the good thing about Zu actually as you point out,, They are directly derived from the PRo arena and concepts used in live pro equipment, and the designs use Pro drivers, designed for a purpose period, without all the extra frills and correction circuitry needed with mainstream audio drivers. But of course they had to break down and start adding pretty colors, machined custom plates etc, to look like a hi end product, but all the money is put in the right place with Zu designs, the Performance, reliability, and sound.

I don't really understand audiophiles belittling science. That's like people who eat belittling agriculture.

Now there are discrepancies between commonly used measurements and subjective preference, but that's hardly a secret. The applicable term is "psychoacoustics", and guess what - it's a science.

If a product works and sounds good, it's because somebody got the science right.

Duke

As an analytical chemist for over 25 years, I know that there are many measurements one can make of a system, be it a chemical system, a biological system or a sound system, and that we do not have measurements that explain every phenomenon precisely. Measurements are useful to describe certain aspects of a system, but rarely do they descibe a system fully. We do the best we can with our existing tools and try to invent new ones to make the measurements the existing tools can't. New tools such as informatics and chemometrics allow us to take many seemingly disparate measurements and synthesize them into a representation of what is truly important about a system - for example, one can take measurements of a person's blood, breath, urine, etc. that are fairly useless in and of themselves and through some chemometric data treatment actually diagnose that person's health, and what diseases they may be susceptible to.

As a Zu Druid owner, I know that the published measurements seem to show something that should sound pretty bad, but the Druids absolutely SING to me. Perhaps we need some new measurements, or some ways to treat the data from the old measurements so that we actually determine the true capabilities of the system.

Ait,

Thanks for the input from your perspective - that of someone with a professional scientific background.

Here's a link that talks about an effort to better correlate measurements with perception in audio by means of a psychoacoustically-weighted metric derived from several different measurements, but focusing on the shape of the transfer function rather than on spectral changes:

http://www.audiomasterclass.com/learn.cfm?a=3651

See also Audio Engineering Society preprints number 5890, 5891, and 6888.

Duke