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Summary of Contents for Zu Audio SOUL 6
- Page 1 SOUL 6 O W N E R S M A N U A L [ 2 0 2 4 ]...
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Page 2: Table Of Contents
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Key Points –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 3 Welcome and Thank You ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 4 Manual Information & Copyright ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 4 Included With Soul Six Loudspeakers –––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 5 Safety Precautions ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 5 Unboxing Soul Six ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– 9 Design Overview ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––... -
Page 3: Key Points
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL KEY POINTS We know you’re excited to get your new Soul Six fired up—still, we strongly recommend you study this manual—at least notice these key points: • Burn-in is very dramatic with Soul Six—please read the Burn-In/Break-In section. • Remove the push-on driver covers to listen. These disks have the sticker Remove to Groove on them. • Soul Six loudspeakers need to have a gap between the floor and bottom side of the loudspeaker to perform as designed. Adjusting the gap height will change the bass characteristics of the Soul Six. -
Page 4: Welcome And Thank You
The latest version of the manual can be found at www.zuaudio.com/downloads © 2000 - 2024 Zu Audio All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means for other than your own use without the written permission of Zu Audio. -
Page 5: Included With Soul Six Loudspeakers
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL INCLUDED WITH LOUDSPEAKERS Included with each pair of Soul Six loudspeakers (2x) slip-fit hard plastic driver covers - installed (8x) 1” long [26 mm] 3/8–16 stainless-steel oval-end stud-feet - installed (8x) 9/16” [14 mm] hex 3/8–16, stainless-steel thin (jam) nuts - installed Additional items included in package (8x) 1-1/2” [38 mm] hardened carpet spikes (1x) finish cleaning cloth Packaging is double-wall cardboard with closed-cell foam frames and end-caps. SAFETY PRECAUTIONS TERMS Read and follow these precautions to use Soul Six loudspeakers safely Zu Audio is not liable for any failures, damages or problems caused by the use or misuse of Soul Six loudspeakers by the purchaser or any third party. - Page 6 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL DANGER - RISK OF SEVERE INJURY OR DEATH DANGER - avoid electrocution by making sure your amplifier is powered down (or the amp’s power cable is disconnected) prior to disconnecting/connecting loudspeakers. Electrocution through touching of bare metal amplifier output posts, bare metal loudspeaker cable connectors when connected to amplifier, or bare metal loudspeaker connectors when connected to the amplifier is possible though extremely rare. Amplifiers designed to output enough power to cause electrocution while operating will generally feature touch-proof contacts such as Neutrik® speakON® connectors. DANGER - place your loudspeakers so there is little to no chance of them falling or tipping over on someone.
- Page 7 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL CAUTION - RISK OF MINOR INJURY OR PROPERTY DAMAGE CAUTION - amplifier may be damaged if the loudspeaker outputs are shorted, i.e., the red (+) and black (–) contacts of a loudspeaker cable come in direct contact with each other while the amplifier is switched on. CAUTION - corners are fragile, do not set or pivot your Soul Six loudspeaker on the corner of cabinet. Pivoting them on the installed footers or spikes is not a problem as they are designed to take those forces.
- Page 8 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL CAUTION - RISK OF PROPERTY DAMAGE CAUTION - do not use the tops of your loudspeakers as a bar table, condensation forming on a container will pool and may cause water damage to the finish, particularly wood veneer finishes. CAUTION - do not use solvents, save water to clean Soul Six. A slightly water-damp soft cloth should be all that is needed. For dusting of the driver we recommend a can of compressed air. CAUTION - we do not recommend storage of Soul Six in non-climate controlled spaces.
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Page 9: Unboxing Soul Six
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL UNBOXING Save all packaging except for the polyester banding and the metal staples. All other parts are needed for repackaging. Failure to repackage as originally packaged increases the odds of the loudspeaker being damaged when transported. -
Page 10: Design Overview
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL SOUL SIX DESIGN OVERVIEW & UNION SIX COMPARISON Soul Six is designed and built to achieve world-class sound within a form that is strongly architecturally considered. For this reason Soul Six may be ordered with or without a Zu logo on the face of the cabinet. -
Page 11: Burn-In / Break-In
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Soul Six’s drivers are paired to the highest possible level, driver pairs that match to an extremely tight deviation tolerance in magnitude and impulse response—the tighter the left/right matching the more natural and satisfying the soundfield, be it stereophonic or monophonic. Soul Six gets Event Mk. II internal cable which increases the resolution of the loudspeaker system to a point where Jupiter Copper capacitors combine in mesmeric ways. Event internal cable and wires features FEP insulation and silver based conductors, within a ZuB3 electrodynamics format. This combination of engineering gives a broad and uniform characteristic impedance to the cable and extremely wide bandwidth while yielding excellent immunity from EMI and also limiting its own radiation. -
Page 12: Burn-In Main Points
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Soul Six receive a minimum of 400 hours of factory burn-in. We discourage the use of any special burn-in specific program material— no special “tones” and no “demagnetizing” material. Just play as often as you can, maybe a bit louder than normal, and selecting big full-scale recordings. The more the speakers play the sooner they will sound their best. Break-in is a fairly simple, straightforward, once-and-done thing (sarcasm eyes). Not funny? Likely not. The humor assumes you like audio-dad jokes and that this is not your first set of new Zu loudspeakers. Unless specified otherwise, what follows are generalizations about burn- in specifically relating to home audio direct radiating Zu loudspeakers. Most find Soul Six to sound great when new, but sometimes a touch harsh. Some find them amazing right out of the box. Some find them to sound strident and less than they had imagined. In all cases users should know that they are going to change, and in most cases, significantly. The sound and enjoyment you will get from them after six to eight weeks of daily evening use is going to be night and day compared when you first get them. Also know that the... - Page 13 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL • Even though Soul Six’s sound will change with play, we still encourage you to follow our guidance on room tuning as performance gains made there increase your enjoyment during the burn-in phase(s). During the in-home burn-in phase we don’t recommend swapping of components without reason and method as burn-in is heavily impacting the sound. And as the in-...
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Page 14: Burn-In & Fatigue Profile
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL BURN-IN / GENERAL OBSERVATIONS Predictive speaker qualities regarding the schedule and impact of burn-in seams to be efficiency and the extent to which speaker-level electrical filtering is employed. A speaker’s sensitivity to electric power inputted and the resulting sound levels outputted is colloquially declared as efficiency. How extensive the use of speaker-level electrical components to achieve the desired sound is crossover complexity. -
Page 15: Fatigue Profile Infographic
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Page 15... -
Page 16: Initial Placement
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL 128 5/8 [3] PIVOT INSIDE FRONT CORNER 80° 60° 40° Page 16... - Page 17 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL INITIAL SOUL SIX PLACEMENT This is an overview, to get your new speakers up and running and sounding good enough. An expanded Zu speaker placement section is further in the manual. Start with the Soul Six speakers placed where you’ve visualized them, likely flanking that rack or casework you have. Soul Six are not overly sensitive to being in just the right place—bass integration may prove otherwise. Bass wavelengths are very large, and moving the speaker a few inches this way or that is not likely to make a meaningful impact in the bass region.
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Page 18: Connecting Amp And Soul Six
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL GAP HEIGHT Soul Six features a technology that improves sound and allows you to adjust the bass charac- teristics. This involves setting the gap height, the space between the bottom of the Soul and your floor. Getting the best performance involves a bit of fuss—getting down on your knees, running the footers up or down, making sure all four are solid... it gets old. Hold off fine tuning the gap height until you get the speakers placed and sounding good in your room. - Page 19 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Page 19...
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Page 20: Connector Detail Zub3
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL CONNECTING YOUR AMP AND SPEAKERS Turn your amp off to reduce the chance of shorting the connectors and damaging it. Soul Six feature 5-way binding posts and ZuB3 via speakON NL8 connectors. ZuB3 refers to both an electromagnetic design and a connection format. The connector we use for the ZuB3 EM design is the Neutrik Speakon NL8. - Page 21 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Page 21...
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Page 22: Amplification Guidance
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL AMPLIFICATION GUIDANCE AMPLIFICATION MATCHING WITH SOUL SIX An often asked question is, which amp should I match up with the Soul Six. This is not a simple question as you need to factor in the rest of the system — room, the sound qualities you value and how loud you play, or how loud you would like to play. Sound levels are the easy part, and for more than 90% of Soul owners, ten to twenty good sounding watts is plenty. Zu loudspeakers are efficient—efficiency being the conversion of electrical input from the amp to the sound output of the speaker. For this reason much less electrical power is needed compared to the vast majority of home audio speakers. Lets start with how loud first. In an... -
Page 23: Tubes Vs Solid-State
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL TUBES VS SOLID-STATE We think this is just dumb, the concept and the question. Tubes can sound all over the map, and the same is true with solid-state. There are plenty of unbearable sounding tube amps and there are plenty of unbearable sounding solid-state. Tubes is just too broad a term to have any meaning, as is solid-state in reference to how they might sound matched up to Soul Six. - Page 24 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Connect up Soul Six with whatever you have. You own it, the cable is sitting there, and hopefully it’s not some exotic hi-fi cable—simple cable can be quite good. If you don’t have something close, just use some home electrical wire, Romex 2/14 or 2/12, likely you have some in the garage or stuffed in a cupboard. No? It’s not expensive and on the spool at the hardware store. Strip the ends and connect it up. Don’t use the center bare ground wire, just cut it back on both ends. It doesn’t matter if you use the white or the black insulated wire for the (+) or (–) just be consistent so both speakers are “in phase”. If you want to try Zu cable, we would be happy to have you audition them. Improvements that will be noticed from quality, well engineered speaker cables which match your amplifier/loudspeaker needs include bass depth and resolution, reduced noise, harmonic structure and timbre, attack, stereophony, and ease of listening.
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Page 25: Room & Speaker Acoustic Tuning
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL LOUDSPEAKER/ROOM TUNING Most of what you will do in room tuning is about timbre—the frequency domain. Knowing what you can affect and what you can’t, or shouldn’t, will help you make quick and sound choices. Before we get into the recommended ways to room tune, we need to understand where in the note we’re working. And we’re going to use a piano for reference, to help keep things clear, zoned into the three main phases of a note. In the future we’ll add color, when there’s more time to write, read and consider. ATTACK - SUSTAIN - DECAY Most of what you will do in room tuning is about tone and the frequency domain and not attack. Knowing what you can affect and what you can’t, or shouldn’t, will help you make good choices. Before you spend a lot of time chasing the room-tune-timbre around the room, understand where in the note you’re listening. Okay, piano for reference and keeping it simple but still useful—attack, sustain, decay. When a piano key is struck, three main characteristics of a note are set in motion—attack, sustain and the decay. The attack of a struck piano note is the impinging hammer, initial string... -
Page 27: Zu Mono & Mirror Method
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Without realizing, people usually tweak things to get the steady-state, the sustain, tonally correct which inadvertently kills the life in the attack, and sometimes the decay. This is a reason why cables as tone control, digital room correction, parametric equalizers and the like don’t fix fundamental time and dynamic range problems. When the sustain runs out of power there is the transition into the decay. How your room sounds and how the speakers work within it dominate the front-side of decay, sometimes swamping the sublets that flourish in the quiet shadows. (One Day I’ll Get It Right by Cracker playing in the background) TUNING / PLACEMENT OF SOUL IN YOUR HOME - ZU MONO-AND-MIRROR METHOD The Zu Mono and Mirror speaker position tuning method is efficient, yielding excellent results without days of fiddling. With speaker placement tuning you are affecting how the wavefronts... - Page 28 SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL Second is tuning of midrange where you are working with smaller moves, six inches [15 cm] this way or that, then three inches [8 cm], then an inch [3 cm] or so. Third is tuning the treble, where it’s more about toe and lean-back, maybe with some subtle nudging of the position, half inches and less [≤13 mm]. Move listen, move listen... taking mental note of changes in sound. Note that moving the sound source also changes how the room reacts. You should only have to move the loudspeaker three or four times to get the bass dialed in, half dozen moves on the mids, and maybe the same for treble. If you are struggling start over with bass. If still struggling, give up on that side and try the other side. Take note of the differences. The devil’s triangle is not a drinking game. Experiment with your speaker placement, your room, where you sit… the changes and improvements to be had are not subtle. BASS REGION / REF FREQUENCY...
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Page 29: Bass Tuning
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL BASS TUNING Select recordings with large amounts of low frequency information; dramatic pipe organ and dance music work as do test recordings that have warbled low frequency tracks (20 - 100 Hz range). But do not use test tones exclusively, your brain needs some transients for contexts to do its best work. Test tones can and often do play a roll, but that steady-state sine, triangle and square-wave signal prove difficult for human brains to interpret without some transient counterpoise. If you don’t have time for several cuts and types of bass, select some modern disco track with a drone influence to make fast work of long wavelength (bass) tuning. Here we go. Loudspeaker is where it is, pointing into the room perpendicular to the front wall, playing at a moderate level (only the one loudspeaker should be on); walk over and kneel down next to it. Kneeling will put your head in the seated listening horizontal plane and allow you to hear how the loudspeaker is influencing, and influenced by, the room. In nearly all rooms, the... -
Page 30: Treble Tuning
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL color... bass and kick drum free. If you’re more sensitive to midbass and power bass then midrange tune in two steps, first select cuts from Bootsy Collins, Mike Watt, Kim Deal, Tony Levin, Jah Wobbe..First step will be pivoting (rotate on vertical axis) the speaker. The inside-front footer is the pivot, i.e., the footer nearest the captain’s chair. Staying with the same loudspeaker room- tuned for bass (you’re still only playing the one speaker) and with your midrange-centric recording playing, pivot-rotate the speaker. Initial firing position is straight into the room,... -
Page 31: Risers
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL TREBLE TUNING At this point you are done nudging the speakers position, treble tuning is mostly about the speakers firing axis, the toe and cant (lean-back) and elevation. The experience you gained with toe when tuning midrange will help you hear the more subtle aspects of treble tuning. Start with toe, try a degree or two inside of where you got midrange tuning. Then try a degree or two outside. Drill down and call it good after a handful of changes. Next move to the lean-back phase. For smaller rooms with low-slung seats no lean-back is typical. But for tall chairs, big... -
Page 32: Care & Maintenance
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL CARE AND MAINTENANCE Soul Six are designed for in-home use. Under normal daily use in an average home you can expect a life-time (100+ years) of trouble-free, high-performance playback. Soul Six do not require any special care aside from keeping them free of being splashed on or misted with airborne materials or impacted by falling artwork, the chainsaw over your mantal that might soon vibrate off, snowboards, waterskis, your rough-and-tumble dog..Occasional dusting is... -
Page 33: Drivers And Connectors
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL FULL-RANGE DRIVER CARE Remove the hard plastic driver covers when using Soul Six. Keep them near as they are effective guards, quickly slipping on to protect the cone from the curious. Also, slipping them on when you’re headed out on vacation safeguards the full-range driver from bugs and dust. To clean Soul’s full-range driver we recommend just using a can of compressed air. If the cone become soiled for any reason we recommend that you call for assistance. -
Page 34: Special Care - Animal Urine
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL CLEANING ANIMAL URINE FROM CONNECTIONS NOTE - Urine may permanently stain or damage the speaker’s finish. Also, the chemical compounds in urine can corrode the connections. If the connectors of the speaker get peed on, remove the speaker cable and clean immediately. To clean urine the speaker’s connectors and finish you need: • 1x of your favorite foaming urine remover • 2x ounces or more of distilled water in a spritz bottle • 1x aerosol can of compressed air... -
Page 35: Recommended Reading On Acoustics
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL RECOMMEND READING ON ACOUSTICS Whatever the reason, the current consumer playback world is generally lost in its conception of acoustics and the nature of sound—much has been written in the hi-fi world but little of it is genuine. Recommended works on the subject of acoustics representing a good cross-section include: Helmholtz, Hermann L. F., On The Sensations of Tone, 4th ed. trans. Alexander J. Ellis (Dover, 1954. Original 1885-77) Rayleigh, J.W.S. Baron, The Theory of Sound, 2nd ed. Vol. 1 & 2, (Dover, 1945. Original 1894) Lamb, Horace, Sir, The Dynamical Theory of Sound, 2nd ed. (Dover, 1960. Original 1925) Jeans, James, Sir, Science & Music, (Dover. Original 1937) Olson, Harry F., Music, Physics and Engineering (Musical Engineering), 2nd ed. (Dover, 1967. Original 1952 & 1967) Benade, Arthur H., Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics, 2nd ed. (Dover, 1976, 1990) Kinsler, Frey, Coppens, and Sanderds, Fundamentals of Acoustics, 4th ed, Wiley, 2000) Page 35... -
Page 36: Specifications
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL SOUL SIX LOUDSPEAKER SPECIFICATIONS Dimensions H x W x D 32 inches [81.5 cm] tall without footers 12.75” [32.5 cm] square footprint 10.5” [26.7 cm] square top Weight 39 pounds [18 kg] Packaged Weight 49 pounds [22 kg] Bandwidth 30 - 29k Hz (typical in-room response) Voltage Sensitivity 99 dB-SPL @ 2.8V, 1m Impedance 8 Ω (5-1/2 Ω Min @ 290 Hz, see curve) Wavefront virtual point source Max SPL Program... -
Page 37: Impedance And Impulse Curve
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL UNION-6 LOUDSPEAKER SPECIFICATIONS Example of Zu Soul Six impedance curve (no filters, no smoothing) Ω 1k Hz Zu Soul Six complete electromechanical impulse response raw (no filters, no smoothing) Page 37... -
Page 38: Warranty
SOUL 6 OWNER’S MANUAL WARRANTY Zu Soul Six loudspeakers have a five year limited warranty from the date of purchase to the original owner. If under normal home use there becomes a problem with drivers, cabinet or other parts Zu will assist in fixing or replacing the product. For warranty eligibility the owner needs to email or call Zu to arrange support. This provides an opportunity to assist in diagnosing the problem and helps coordinate for rapid turnaround. Final warranty eligibility will be determined upon inspection of parts or product. Service options, parts availability and response times vary. - Page 39 Z U A U D I O O g d e n C o m m e r c i a l I n d u s t r i a l P a r k 3 3 5 0 S . 1 5 0 0 W . O g d e n , U T 8 4 4 0 1 —...
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