[miklorsmith]

http://6moons.com/audioreviews/zu/druid.html

Kurt Sudan here.  Ricky Venezuela has fixed position earlier than expected.  Preliminary data for Project Druid is on target.  Unsecure channels require incomprehensible code-speak but the establishment is asleep and not monitoring channels.  Speed is our ally and with good fortune we may just take them in their bedclothes.

Good luck, gentlemen.  Sudan out.

[JeffB]

miklorsmith,

One thing I can't tell from the article involves the speaker cable.
Does the $2800 price include the speaker cable?
Is the article saying that the cable would sell for $1159.
Do you have to use Zu's cable?
This speaker is tempting, but $2800 is a little steep for me.  It would be great to be able to use some less expensive cable and save $1k.

[miklorsmith]

It's a pile of dough, no getting around that.  Sean at Zu told me to tell people the cables are included, though it's not listed that way on the site.

I was on the fence when I called.  Sean told me they had a few pairs that had minor cosmetic issues they'd ship for under $2k without cables.  Based on the workmanship/quality of these, I'd guess if they were willing to ship them at all, the cosmetics would be very minor indeed and probably not on the face.  He also said they like to ship their cable with the speakers, as their cable theory is that keeping cable geometry constant from amp to driver is good.  This especially makes sense considering there's no crossover to muddy the waters.

Srajan will "get" these, and will be using them with the Clari-T.  I expect not one but a series of reviews and articles as a result.  I'm getting the same kind of dumbfounding experiences running my rig as Dmason is getting from his, and I'm just using a bone-stock Clari-T.  I can't wait for the hopped-up dual mono to arrive.

Best advice is call Sean or Adam at Zu.  I'll bet they'd downgrade to a lower cable grade which they'll tell you is hardly a downgrade, at a reduced price.  I actually went longer with a lower grade.  They're really cool guys and won't "sell" you anything.

[Vinnie R.]

I can't wait for the hopped-up dual mono to arrive.
 ...

Hi miklorsmith,

The parts are all in and I started it today!  Expect it to ship out to you next week, and prepare to be one very happy Red Wine customer!  

Maybe I should make one for Srajan, eh?  

[miklorsmith]

You should.  masonD is right, the next unit out should be premium.  Every possible upgrade should be included.  Look at the other reviews - they all say "sure, you could go cheaper, but. . ."

Let 'em know HOW good this can be.  Do us proud, soldier!

[Paul_Bui]

miklorsmith et al,

You read my mind.  I was thinking of asking around how people like or describe the sound of the Druid M4 speakers.  Perhaps I missed certain posts while I was excited on the ClariT.  Nevertheless, until 6moons review, please tell me about them again.  They might well be my next speakers.

[miklorsmith]

My system - Modwright tubed CDP, Modwright tubed pre, stock stereo Clari-T, Druids.  There, OK:

I have heard of electronics not passing much of their own personality.   Generally, this is not said of speakers, as they always lend their flavor to the mix.  These get as close to a true conduit to the recording I've heard.  They do all the cool hi-eff tricks with immediacy and dynamics that we lo-power boys drool over, in spades.  The string plucks, drumstick thwacks, and vocal edges hit you all over, giving the sensation of feeling the music as you would with bass.  It's pretty spooky.  Dynamics are agile and lifelike.  All the parts of the music are painted of the same palate on the same canvas with unison and integrity, with no part calling attention to itself.

They do not have the balance issues of other hi-eff speaks I've heard.  They Never get confused.  I've tried to throw them off balance with Metallica, Mozart, dance-club, and any other challenging stuff I could think of, and the one driver shrugs and says "that it?"

They are impervious to volume.  At whispers, the full range comes through if you've got a quiet room.  Yet, with the stock Clari-T they will play dance club thunderbass at 105 db without breaking a sweat.  The 101 db rating is legit.  They make the Clari-T sound like a Halcro.

In short, they sound like what they're fed.  Female vocals are sublime.  The supertweeter just fills in the tip of sparkle to bring everything to life.  Tonal balance seems evenhanded, though I've done no measurements.  Build quality is absolutely beautiful.  Every part is made by Zu in the US.

Qualms?  Mine are almost always shoved in corners.  They sound good there, but they don't image.  I'm sure placement is a big part of this, but can't say definitively.  I can easily locate them in the room.  Bass?  Very tuneful and balanced and Fast.  It blends and keeps up with the rest of the speaker, which is a considerable feat.  However, it's not bone-crushing and is mostly nonexistant below 40 hz.  They are tall, non-wood-looking, and cast a presence in any room they grace.

Last, I've said it before, but they are as cheap to try as anything on the market.  They pay crating and shipping your way and there's no return fee.  This will certainly make a returned pair cost less than $100 out of pocket, a supreme deal.

[Paul_Bui]

Thanks miklorsmith for an eloquent response.  It's so tempting I would probably start saving now.

[ooheadsoo]

I owe it to myself to hear one of these things one day.  Everyone says that they sound so great but the frequency response is off the chart, almost literally.  It's not something that is all that easy to spot by ear without direct comparison, though, so maybe it doesn't matter.

[-Richard-]

Hi miklorsmith,

I really enjoyed your "Burroughs-esgue"
"secret society" writings...beautifully worked
out and really funny...Deb asked me why in
heaven I was laughing so loud...

I also enjoyed your description of the Druids...

For some mad reason I feel in love with the Druids
when I saw them on the web...but I admit I do not
exactly know why...something about the way they
are designed that catches me off guard and makes
me a bit weak in the knees...or perhaps the "copy" on
the sight is what I want to hear so something in the
brains cortex is ignited?...whatever the reason I have
this strong sensation that this could be the speaker I
have looking for...

You seem extremely level headed...and I mean that
as my highest compliment...so that makes your sober
yet glowing description all the more seductive...I admit
that you have helped light a fire under my own "lurking"
feelings that has activated all the necessary neurons to
fire in the same direction...to wanting to at least hear these
things and see if they give me the magic I crave...

Thanks for taking the time to share your insights with us...

Incidentally, I  have a deep interest in the Druids as a culture...
The females shared all the same roles with the males...warriors,
judges, scholars, shamans...they did not believe in "ownership"
of the land...but like our own Native Americans saw themselves
as stewards of the land and shared it together collectively...
they were fierce warriors who conquered the Roman armies
at several important battles spreading fear and panic among
the entire Roman culture...the Romans feared them on another
level as well...they were terrified that their women might learn
of the freedom of the Druid women to pursue legitimate careers...
in Rome a women was either a sequested housewife, a vestal
virgin or a whore and that was it! The Druids appear to be the same
people that populated India...their language and even religious myths
were almost exactly same...somewhere near the Danube river these
ancient peoples split...one part of them going east to India where they
formed the later Hindu and the other part heading west to form
the Druids...eventually Rome and then Christianity forced them to
go underground...but they are still very much alive today as a
"secret" culture...which you should find interesting miklorsmith,
with your vivid imagination...Winston Churchill was a Druid...
and there exists a photograph of him among his bearded
white robbed brethren.

Warm regards -Richard-

[miklorsmith]

But, we Are a secret society, no?  Actually, since commoners already think we're a public, overt society we could hide easily in plain view if we wanted. . .Turn the dream into reality HAHAHAHAHA  No, Kurt, no!  Damn you, back I say!!  We're (I'm) better now, right, doc?

Glad you enjoyed.  It was fun to write.  We're all here to have fun, eh?    Learning too!  Now I know more about my favorite speaks.

If you want to demo, call Sean.  He'll try to connect you with someone in your area to lend a hand.

P.S.  I've said this before too - I'm not being compensated in any way by Zu.

[-Richard-]

Hi Steven Rayle,

I do not know if you received my response to
your Email...I think there may be something
seriously wrong with my ability to send responses
on Audio Circle...

I would love to see you and Laura in Ojai when
you get here...here is my Email address...

If you have not received my response to your
Email write me here and we can correspond
together and I can give you the information
you need so we can get together...

richardwaxberg@earthlink.net

looking forward to seeing you soon...

Warm regards -Richard-

[nathanm]

Incidentally, I have a deep interest in the Druids as a culture...

Wow, and they said nobody knew who they were, or...what they were doing.

[-Richard-]

Hi Nathanm,

The strands of modernity that have us all
transfixed into some sort of hypnotized zone...
directly brought about by a heightened immersion
into media of all kinds and a paralyzing dependence
on technology has had the effect of blurring and finally
erasing our cumulative past...

Except for the last few thousand years...a blink of the eye really...
our vast human history was characterized by a direct
connection to the mystery that religions want us now
to believe they "own" and regulate...treating god as a
kind of technology that they have "access" to through
their specialized "media"...

Before the rise of religions...and before that to the emergence
of the shamans...who acted as intermediaries with the great mystery...
that dimension of "being" that seems to elude our modern
consciousness...the entire human family seemed to be in
constant contact with "it"...with the realm of "silent knowledge"
that could be tapped and used so that we could move with
intelligence and safety through this strange planet with its
thousands of strange phenomena that appear and disappear
as if by magic...anyone who has encountered a magnificent
wild animal like a bear in the woods knows what I mean...

Then came the great shift...and no one seems to know precisely why...
that moved us out of this "contact" with the great mystery and then the
subsequent great "fall"...the Bible describes it as the "expulsion" from Eden...
and it must have felt like an expulsion to the human family that was torn from
their connection to the source of life and then left adrift in an alien world...
the world of the "present" in which contact with this active dimension of
knowing "seems" to be no longer available...

For thousands of years the shamanic tradition was able to allow us limited
but active contact with this source...for at least a few members of our "tribe"...
and native peoples still practice this important human facility...
like our own native Americans...

The Druids also practiced this "sorcery"...a word that religion has purposely
defiled and shunted to the outer fringes of our understanding...a word we
have been conditioned to hate, mistrust and condemn...yet another example
of the power of conditioning to alter our perceptions and control our perceptual life...

To the present human consciousness...the ability to control the forces of nature
are thought to be the exclusive domain of science...with its powerful technologies...

But the Druid's could control the forces of nature on many levels...

Hitler had a real and not unfounded fear of the Druid presence in England...
few among us know that during World War 2 the Druid's were secretly
employed in sending energetic "force" waves against the German war
machine into the world that impacted directly on the outcome of the war...
it is said that Hitler never invaded England for fear of encountering
this powerful "energy" directly...

Many things are going on "behind the scenes" in this world...there are powerful
"remnants" from former paradigms of shamanistic traditions that are actively
trying to keep their traditions alive in spite of our modernity...if anyone is
interested one could check out the BBC tape of the "Elder Brothers" who still
live in the mountains of Columbia...and that is only one tradition...

One day...and that day may not be far away...the Druid's will appear again in
England and Ireland and other places in the world...their power will be intact...
and they will help to balance the very unbalanced forces of nature that our
modernity is destroying in an unprecedented orgy of destruction...

Warm regards -Richard-

[miklorsmith]

Great stuff!  Anyone wanting to tap into the great and mystical world need go no further than walking in the woods.  Real woods, not the patch of trees by your house.  It's not as far away as it seems.  The mountains around Seattle are glorious and spiderwebbed with hiking trails.  My burgeoning family and their needs have kept me from getting truly away lately, but I Know it's there and there is solace in that.  We have become conditioned to expect no connection with the wild world, but we're animals deep down and true immersion in the elements brings it back into focus very quickly.

Man, that would be wild if the human Druids busted out with some kind of world wide revolution!  Sounds like the latest installment of "The DaVinci Code".  Maybe Srajan is a Druid!  Yah!!!  His interest in the Druid speakers is a message to all the other Druids that big things are afoot.  

His reviews will be peppered with code, stuff like "the sound is mellifluous from hair-tingling treble to bowel-shaking bass", and "they are as an ambitious red wine that tries to do too much and somehow succeeds".  This will be interpreted as "the heathens must be taught a lesson" and "what do you use for athlete's foot?"

And, the guys at Zu HAVE to be in.  It's their freakin' speaker!  They must be the upper eschelon "dark hoods".  Their website is the hub for the world-wide movement and distributor of all the codespeak around the planet.  Yeah!!  And, they're in Utah!!  With all the Mormons around, nobody would even think they're up to anything.  Hide in plain view indeed.  Utter genious.  How did it take me so long to see?

This is awesome!!!  This is way better than the fake-o secret society I thought I was making up.  The only problem is I'm not in the zoo looking out this time, I'm one of the gawkers looking in.  Oh well.  Hopefully I'll have a front-row seat.

Sudan out.

[Dmason]

Interesting to note that Stonehenge as we know it, was in practical use for far longer than any of the great cathedrals of Europe. Before that, it was in evolution for somewhere between 5 and 8,000 years. These people it has been argued were apparently tuned into the Truths coming to them from both Inner and Outer space. Read everything you can by author Ursula K. LeGuin, especially her EarthSea Trilogy.

Noted American clarivoyant Peter James visited Stonehenge and in particular the many barrows and earthworks around Salisbury Plain and commented on a great amount of "collective" energy, highly different from that which he had perceived in the past. He has since been drawn back, and now lives in Devon, for personal reasons.

Some believe the ancient ways were set in motion by the acts of "friends from out of town," others believe they merely honed sensitivities which have become sadly lost to us, traded in for a materialistic, commerce-based culture, now bent on self destruction, the exact antithesis of the ancient mores.

There are forty stories in the Bible that fall well within the context and parameters of the modern UFO phenomenon.

There are many quantum physicists who believe there was possibly another science that had become lost along the way. ...Perhaps the shaman, or quantum physician, others who were in proper "tune," could strike a chord, or bang a drum, effect a change, and the sarcens danced across the field. The sarcens add up, at least to the civil engineers who vivisected the build. The obvious answer is not always the correct one. The pyramids do not add up. The timelines of ancient new world cultures do not. There is clearly something missing. Some lost quantum understanding.

[-Richard-]

Quite correct DMason...
a sage, penetrating and acute observation of
what is, after all, a history that is presented as if its
normal threads are "gradual" and linear...

The real problem resides in the very structure
of human consciousness as it now exists...
a rather limited cognitizing apparatus that
thinks it is in control of what it perceives...

In fact it is! But only in the worst sense of that
implication...its limitations bind all incoming
sensory information into a form that fits nicely
into its simplistic perceptual life...anything that
resides outside its limited paradigm of the real
is relegated to the junk pile of the "hallucinogenic,"
"insane," or in former times the works of the devil...
and is immediately discounted as a phantasmagoric
phenomenon that makes anyone who admits to
having such perceptual "insights" suspect of being
out of their mind...in other words an alien among us...

Under this narrow stress of perception is it any wonder
that the "rational" mind has been elevated in our times
to the highest niche of human development?

And there it ends...in spite of a universe of information
that points to the existence of other dimensions that
seem to be present and parallel to our own...

However, in order to perceive the “energetic fields”...
something the ancients did naturally...one need only
study the “science” of “ley lines” which were carefully
mapped out over the entire earth in ancient times in
order for sorcerers to participate more fully in the
energetic fields that gave rise to dramatic shifts of perception...
one would have to transcend the current agenda of the
brain...which is programmed for a form of reptilian aggression
built around anything that is characterized as the “other”...

This current "consciousness" has at its root an irrational fear
of anything that does not fit its paradigm of the real...

And the “other” changes according to the current whim of
political and cultural forces that are always on the lookout
for new targets...the result is that we are at war with nature...
and ourselves...nature is the unknown...and must be destroyed...
only the “known” can be allowed to exist in this agenda...and
our religions are clearly missing any form of responsibility for
the stewardship of nature...an omission designed around our
hatred and fear of nature...the unknown...

History is clearly missing huge areas of human experience
that is blurred over and discounted...

During the medieval period...and we are speaking of
the fourth through the fifteenth century...eleven hundred
years...knowledge of our past was systematically destroyed
or hidden by the Christian Church...that knowledge was clearly
not compatible with its cosmology...which saw the earth as the
center of the universe and all science...including medical science...
as ending somewhere within the Greek post Periclesian era...

As serfs bought their personal freedom from their masters...the
overlords of feudal Europe...they set up small towns that eventually
became our modern cities and began to control their own education...
serfs began to read and write and history was once again reconstructed...
this was the dawning of the growth of our modern intellectual disciplines
and sciences...

But the rupture did its damage...a great deal was lost to us...

Other critical destructions of knowledge was carried out by the fascist
Romans who burned down the incredible libraries of Alexandria
which contained records and knowledge that would have
certainly linked us to the missing threads of former civilizations...
such as Mu and Atlantis...

Is it any surprise that some of the first acts of the Nazi German’s was
to burn books? And these forces lurk among us...yes...even in our
own culture known for its freedom from oppression...these forces are
waiting to once again gain control over us...because they understand
that the real war that is being fought is a war of attrition...and it is our
slumbering...our lack of vigilant awareness..that will finally see our
last vestiges of freedom erased from our lives...

So there is only one way that we can reconnect or we can reconstruct our
original “nature”...which is to say with perceptual powers of awareness that
we once possessed but no longer can access because of our current “conditioning”...
that rules out, apriori, the possibility for this transformational leap of consciousness...
and that would be to by-pass or transcend the current mind with its dogmatic
insistence that there are “real” limitations to our perceptual powers...a vestigial
organ or the dead religious thought “control” machine and their agendas...and
later the political apparatus that still supports them...and that would be to drop
any false sense of limitation...

To that end any research or serious inquiry into the obvious dropped stitches of
our current historical fabric would help serve that purpose of freeing our minds...
Thanks, DMason, for your sharp blow to the midsection of what we have come to
accept...in our timidity and tranquilized state...as the real...

Warm regards -Richard-

[JLM]

Another fasinating people are the aborigines.

Conventional science and western philosophy has so well addressed our daily physical wants that we discount eastern medicine and a host of other realms of thought.

I define "conventional science" as what passes in our schools as science, where students are ordered to accept theory as fact and not taught the scientific method.  IMO this is why science hasn't progressed in 50 years (only exstrapulations of technology that ride on the back of yesterday's science.

[Yu]

Druids? Where was I, dolmens, dolmas, doldrums? The world is more mysterious than we know. Like those ancient "batteries" that are (used to be?) in the Bagdad museum... batteries... right. Oh, yes, batteries! Now, I know where I was... Clari-T! Clari-T, consciousness, and, uh... un...

CHAIRMAN: ...Which brings us once again to the urgent realisation of just how much there is still left to own. Item six on the agenda: the meaning of life. Now, uh, Harry, you've had some thoughts on this.
 
HARRY: That's right. Yeah, I've had a team working on this over the past few weeks, and, uh, what we've come up with can be reduced to two fundamental concepts. One: people are not wearing enough hats. Two: matter is energy. In the universe, there are many energy fields which we cannot normally perceive. Some energies have a spiritual source which act upon a person's soul. However, this soul does not exist ab initio, as orthodox Christianity teaches. It has to be brought into existence by a process of guided self-observation. However, this is rarely achieved, owing to man's unique ability to be distracted from spiritual matters by everyday trivia.
 
[pause]
 
BERT: What was that about hats, again?

(Chairman, Harry and Bert dialogue courtesy
of "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life")

[ohenry]

People aren't wearing enough tin foil hats.  Damn voices.