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What makes a loudspeaker good Good loudspeakers play all genres of music, with real intensity, in perfect time with convincing tone. They reproduce music in a way that hooks you and pulls you in—they make you want to listen. Today we are cursed with a market full of unnatural sounding speakers, most featuring three or more speaker-drivers, complex crossover networks, low efficiency, and all claiming to sound perfect, lifelike, and better than the rest. Empty rhetoric if you ask us. Modern hi-fi speakers sound amazingly similar, and nothing close to real. Tweeters that make your ears bleed. Woofers smaller than pancakes making all drums sound fake, and the stereo image they cast compares, on a visual level, to early ‘80s computer animation. The way the majority of loudspeakers are being done in hi-fi today is not the right way.We think a loudspeaker must have a wide dynamic range, which is the ability to play from very low to very high levels, with a linear, distortion-free dynamic behavior. This is held as the fundamental rule on which all Zu loudspeakers are based. In any loudspeaker there are five fundamental areas that make up its quality or tone: frequency, bandwidth, time, dispersion, and dynamic range. An engineer can, in most cases, borrow (or diminish) dynamic range to fix problems that exist in a loudspeaker’s bandwidth, frequency, and time domains, but the opposite is not true, leaving dynamic range as the defining character. Either a speaker has it, or it doesn’t. (Dispersion is application specific.) When playing music these domains do not behave in a linear way and it’s the deficit, or linearity between them that must be the engineers focus if real tonal fidelity is to be had. In addition to dynamic realism, a good hi-fi loudspeaker will also create a uniform, full-range wave-front, with all notes emanating from the same point and in the same time, so fidelity can be had throughout a listening area. Tone-textures, density, resolution and spatial qualities are all degraded if this is not realized. Nearly all of today’s loudspeakers, apart from Zu of course, fail to meet these criterion with linear dynamic behavior. A full-range, direct radiating loudspeaker-driver can provide better timing than a multi-driver loudspeaker and, when properly designed and built, can eliminate the distortions introduced by crossovers and filters. Zu hi-fi loudspeakers do not use any crossover or filter components on its full-range drivers, and we think you will notice the clarity, aliveness and presence—even if you are used to much more expensive brands. Tests and measures can easily show all five facets of a loudspeaker’s performance, however, current practices in measuring loudspeakers—steady-state, odd FFT and data processing, single point mic location—result in little correlative data as to how it will perform under dynamic conditions, like music, and have little relevance to how it might sound in a living room. Technically, bandwidth does fall within amplitude domain but since bandwidth is so important, and can be engineered around amplitude goals, Zu handles it as a primary feature. |