At the VTV show, the hotel room configuration did not allow anything by anyone to sound particularly good, so everyone was handicapped but the room traits varied somewhat, different exhibitors had varying coping strategies for addressing the dysfunctional acoustics, and varying equipment was vulnerable in varying ways. In the Zu room, clearly Druids were bass-shy in the immediate listening area, but when I stepped back into the anteroom to for a phone call I could hear more bottom range from the setup back there, with more linear distance between the speakers and my ears.
It's hard to anticipate what any one person considers sufficient when it comes to bass output. The Druid maintains its acoustic power down to a little below 40Hz, which I get in my home. It falls off below that just as spec'd. Flat to 40Hz or so sounds like real bass to me, even if another 20 cycles of range are missing. I have Druids and Definitions in the same house, different rooms. Sure, the Defs go deeper -- they're supposed to and they have a 4x10" sub-bass array. But I never feel I have to listen to Defs exclusively to reproduce convincing bass. The bass character of the Druid is fast, clean, tight and tuneful. Not bloated in any way.
There are some variables to consider and the chief one is the gap between your floor and the bottom surface of the Druid's baseplate. Sean and Adam recommend stacking 2 CD jewel boxes as your gap guage, and my own experiments on hard floors confirm that's correct. Up or down from that mean, very small differences have quite audible effects on bass character and apparent depth. Closer to the floor seems to harden the attack but lean out the character. Higher fattens up the bass, more like an old tube amp, with less distinct transient detail. Carpet poses its own variables. If you don't have both, get the short and tall spikes from Zu and experiment.
The Druid is relatively insensitive to corner loading. Cables and amp selection have big effects on overall sound as well as your perception of bass. The Druid looks simple but it is an amazingly revealing instrument worthy of associated gear out of scale to its own price, as well as capable of uplifting modest gear to unexpected performance. Certainly, they are worth a pair of Zu Ibis cables if you can swing them. Or one of the less expensive grades. If you use a tube amp, even differences in tubes can tune the bass. In a 300B for instance, you can get a fast, harder attack from KR or the Chinese solid plate tubes, and alternately hear fuller, fatter bass from mesh plates. In the 845s, the Chinese variants all deliver markedly different character for tuning the system.
Speakers that are flat to 40Hz aren't bass shy, but the bass content has to be in the performance. However, most of the speakers most people have listened to all their lives have delivered decidedly inaccurate bass. It can be disconcerting to be in the absence of that.
I would not consider any subwoofer other than a Method to mate with a Druid. It presents the same problem as trying to match a sub with Quad ESLs -- almost hopeless. Even and REL doesn't have the transient quickness and articulation. And the harmonic distortion of most compact subs is too disturbing to match to the Druid's clean tone. Yeah, it's a mono solution unless you want to pop for 2, but then you might as well step up to Definitions. I'd tune the variables and otherwise leave well enough alone.
Phil
