Zu Omen speakers

[killdozzer]

Lots of things make it bad.

The cabinet is badly made with a nasty resonance centered on 300 Hz.

The designer can't tune a cabinet and looses an octave between 30 and 60 Hz.

The driver is driven well into break up mode with huge suck out and irregular response. Energy is delayed and stored in the cone causing a boat lot of problems at break up. There is irregular frequency response, time delay and beaming.

To boot the tweeter is playing too loud with excess HF energy.

The reviews must have tin ears or more likely want advertising revenue. I feel confident I could write the frequency response of that speaker in a very short listen.

If you look at the results you see what you would expect, that that 10" driver needs crossing over at 400 Hz and a mid range driver to take the load to somewhere between 4 and 5 kHz.

That speaker is an audiophool lash up if ever I saw one.

Don't mind me bumping this one. I was really interested in how well these perform. I was hoping for more, I admit. I thought it's an all American product (at least that's what they say), I hope things were done properly.

I almost started a new thread with the same topic. I'm glad I didn't as it seems to be no real reason (unless they read AH posts and decided to do something about it ), but I had to bump it.

Here's why; some members post comments with their own recommendations of some speakers that would be "more bang for buck", one of them recommended Gedlee Harper and when I went looking for these I got a ton of pics with some strange erotic fetish . Basically, it features women nicely dressed in some type of a shorter dress, often sitting with their legs crossed perhaps showing what is literally an iota more than usual. They would probably allow these photos for a year book, That's how innocent it is.

Then, just one decent scroll down and there was on hog-tied in a similar outfit.

Now, that's what I call a speaker that could bring Zu on their feet.

Who the Hell was Gedlee Harper originally and why it became a fetish??

 

[Bucknekked]

Don't mind me bumping this one. I was really interested in how well these perform.

OK, I checked and the OP for the thread about Zu speakers hasn't been back and posted anything since the day he authored this thread. I hope that means I can't possibly offend him by posting a reviewer who did some review work on the Zu speakers. It was just too much to pass up. Honest, this is a real review.

http://noaudiophile.com/Zu/

"First impressions are bright, stupid bright, staring at a welding torch, Burn your ear drum with sparklers bright. I've listen to plenty of shitty speakers, but these are the only ones that I actually feel like I'm damaging my hearing by just listening at 70db on the couch...........

This is a fu$%ing joke. I have heard big box speakers sound multitudes of times better than this and play much louder and clearer as well. This can't be a matter of taste, the wife said after just 15 seconds of listening "these are awful" and she usually has nothing to say about my speakers. This is instinct level bad, no training required. If you have ears and have ever heard music before you will have a natural inherent disdain for the way these sound.

These have the resonant frequency of nails on a chalk board

If you have ever heard a speaker out of its enclosure driver laying on a table, that is the sound I'm hearing. I imagine the military could mount these speakers to the front of assault vehicles and use them as some type of sonic weapon to scare off civilians.

It sounds like when you go to a concert and it's the day after and your ears all fu$%ed and ringing the next morning because you were a dumb ass and didn't wear ear plugs. That's the sound.

I'm not listening to this s-h-i-t anymore, it's horrible."

I believe this is now my all time favorite speaker review.

 

[lovinthehd]

I don't think Mikey liked them I'd read that before, he definitely expresses his opinion well....

 

[killdozzer]

If you have ears and have ever heard music before

I love things this simple; Do you have ears, mam?
- Well, yes I do! What kind of a silly question is this?
- Then, I'm afraid, these might not be what you're looking for. However, there's one other possibility - have you ever heard music before?



This is New York Times cartoon material!

 

[Swerd]

Zu made miserable speakers, overpriced, and poorly designed. That much is well documented. But Zu paid attention to what cosmetics and appearance might appeal to a younger (hipster) segment of the market. That seemed to work, despite the poor sound quality. We shouldn't be surprised .

Zu also took advantage of the earlier success of several Internet Direct speaker manufacturers, and imitated them with a large email (spam) and internet advertising campaign. They worked to create a wide spread "buzz" for their new speakers. It was an artificial effort, but it worked. We shouldn't be surprised .

Zu, apparently sold a lot of speakers over the short run. A year or two later, I saw a lot of Zu speakers up for sale on various used speaker sales web sites. Again, we shouldn't be surprised .

 

[killdozzer]

We shouldn't be surprised .
We shouldn't be surprised .
Again, we shouldn't be surprised .

Oh, but I am. Everything you said might have worked fine for them if only they even bothered to copy or approximate a successful design. This is what always confuses me. I get it; you want to make some money on pretty-pretty boys and you don't want to do R&D, fine. Take some generic design that plays at least as well as some Infinity middle-priced and then make the nice finish and do some "hipster oriented marketing". Otherwise no wonder it blows in their face.

 

[Swerd]

Oh, but I am. Everything you said might have worked fine for them if only they even bothered to copy or approximate a successful design…

Everything did work fine for Zu – they sold a lot of speakers. It may not have worked out so well for those who fell for the marketing campaign. But most of them bought Zu speakers because they thought they wanted something that looked and sounded different. They did get their wish.

But for all I know, the original owners of Zu may have sold the company. No one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public.

 

[Bucknekked]

But for all I know, the original owners of Zu may have sold the company. No one ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the public.

I still remember when I was asking about Salk, KEF, and SVS here in the AH forums to make my speaker decision. A newb came on to the forum and said I should drop all those guys and definitely go with Zu because Zu was new and awesome. That's the first time I had ever heard of Zu. The newb offered no backup as to why Zu was awesome, just the flat statement they were better than my contenders.

He took some arrows on that particular day from local tribesman. I don't think that fellow ever posted again, at least under that avatar name.

 

[Swerd]

… A newb came on to the forum and said I should drop all those guys and definitely go with ** because ** was new and awesome… He took some arrows on that particular day from local tribesman. I don't think that fellow ever posted again, at least under that avatar name.

That was typical of their hit & run posts, IMO probably was a company shill.

Being a self-admitted Salk & Philharmonic Audio fan-boy, I have difficulty with companies like ** because there is a fine line dividing our audio forum chatter, but a large difference between the speakers. If I remember correctly, in the incident you mentioned, I lurked in the shadows while other well-trained, local tribesmen took their shots. I didn't have to say a word .

Note how I refuse to type in the real name of ** (a two letter word that sounds like zoo). Earlier in this thread I had forgotten that. I wonder if they have some feature that automatically alerts them whenever their name, or one of their products, is mentioned on a forum.

 

[Bucknekked]

Note how I refuse to type in the real name of ** (a two letter word that sounds like zoo). Earlier in this thread I had forgotten that. I wonder if they have some feature that automatically alerts them whenever their name, or one of their products, is mentioned on a forum.

swerd,
You may be on to something. It follows the way they do it in the movies.
"he who must not be mentioned". (The Mummy). Then somebody says his name and scary noises and wind appear.

I must adopt this method in the future. You may be correct in they have a bot out there looking for references to their name. It prompts visits in the night.

 

[Pogre]

I went to their site to check them out.

"Sanctification of the inner detail—bass through treble, not simply treble hyped."
"Significantly elevated emotional teleportation powers."

That's what jumped out at me when I opened the page. I closed the page after reading those 2 lines.

 

[Bucknekked]

I went to their site to check them out.

"Sanctification of the inner detail—bass through treble, not simply treble hyped."
"Significantly elevated emotional teleportation powers."

That's what jumped out at me when I opened the page. I closed the page after reading those 2 lines.

pogre
you risked your own audio health by going to that website and reading.
That's very brave of you and I commend you for your courage.
Now, go get some brain bleach and try and scrub that nonsense out if you can.
be safe. be well.

 

[lovinthehd]

pogre
you risked your own audio health by going to that website and reading.
That's very brave of you and I commend you for your courage.
Now, go get some brain bleach and try and scrub that nonsense out if you can.
be safe. be well.

OTOH he could be zombiefied by now!

 

[Pogre]

The whole page read like religious kookery. I thought it was a goof at first.

 

[Bucknekked]

The whole page read like religious kookery. I thought it was a goof at first.

I thought the same thing the first time I went there. Many of the terms were religous terms.
Sanctification was one that caught my eye right off the bat. I'm not going back to get the context, but you needed their brand of sanctification in order to have a true listening experience.

I too thought there may have been a joke being played. If you cruise the site however, it gets deeper and piled higher. You are a brave man for having traveled there alone. I hope you can shake it off and not need any further counseling. Of course, the brethren at AH are ready, willing and able to help you if you start spouting gobblygook terminlology in an evangelical manner.

 

[Pogre]

I wish my speakers were sanctified and had teleportation powers. I'm taking my Ultras to church today and see if they can bless them with magic powers like the zoos.