SEAN CASEY
FOUNDER // INDUSTRIALIST-propagandist
SEAN@ZUAUDIO.COM

I love Beck’s music, Jeff and the unnamed, mostly the unnamed Beck. Recently I was asked about my leadership philosophy, He’s A Mighty Good Leader came to mind.

He's a mighty good leader
All the way
All the way, Lord
From up to heaven
He's a mighty good leader
All the way

While a corner of my head was masturbating to Beck, the thinking part of me had this to say: Philosophy and methodology of leadership depends completely on the framework and purpose. Even so, there are some generalities, traits found in good, honest leaders. An honest leader strives for profound understanding of the systems and objectives; can see and communicate the big picture; surrounds herself with experts with differing points of view; listens; balances intuition and reason, with reason receiving heavy weighting; assembles strong, capable teams and builds robust systems; reduces his own authority and prominence and places the power in the hands of the many so that the many can carry on and make things better. A truly great and honest leader helps lay a foundation of success, that in the end reduces his or her influence and power to that of just a man.

 While Sean attended WSU for several years with a , his education in physics has largely been self taught, focused in the fields of acoustics, electrodynamics and wave mechanics. . Husband and father of three. Born in 1970 and a professional in the audio industry since 1984 less a year working with the late great Ron "Ogre" Griewe and Zack Paul in the motorcycle industry. Life alongside audio and music includes family, motorcycles, snowboarding, waterskiing and anything else the mountains of Ogden can offer up.

Most of us here at Zu have been into it for way too long. I picked up a pair of used Klipsch LaScala loudspeakers at the age of 14—I worked them off wiring up the home and car audio relay switching system at Lynn’s A/V new store. On weekends and during school that year, I worked my ass off trying to get them sounding just right, replacing caps, inductors, revising values, learning time-delays, bi/tri-amping, line-level processing… eventually taking a deep dive into wire and cable and my grandpa's lost racks of U.S. military wire and cable, much of it exotic silver and silver plated. U.S. military surplus, ahhh, nothing like digging through racks and racks of super cool, perfectly good top-shelf junk. But I was sick well before this, still a boy, and with an impression as strong as if it were yesterday, I remember how that 1/4" phone connector felt and sounded like when I first helped patch a PA sound system together. I’m quite certain we're all sick like that here at Zu. Certainly Harvey and James could battle for

When an innovation and tangible products based company loses its "hands-on" connection with the thing it makes—choosing to maximize margin instead of product performance—originality is lost and the product debased. Take RCA, Tesla, Altec, and so many others; when product innovation and quality fails to be the motivating force, sayonara to inspiration and personal satisfaction.

Art and music mirrors nature in a lot of ways. Nature's a lot about resonances and cycles and rhythms. Nature has no ethics or morality. Neither does music. It operates on a level where words aren't. There's always going to be a hankering to get connections on a non-word level. Can we have ideas that don't have words for them? You can't know anything, you can only believe. The way you describe what you believe is a prison. Music is a way to get around that. —Mike Watt