After Gerrit Koer confirmed delivery specifics, UPS emailed details. My two packages were 190lbs, quite studly for compact '1.5-way' floorstanders. Darin 'Big D' Higley had labored over their custom lacquer skins. He's the crew's resident spray-booth expert who otherwise loves aiming his nozzle at V-twins and hotrods. Perusing the team's web bios, a common thread in fact is a love of the great Utah outdoors and associated sports, be it snow boarding, climbing or two-wheeling in various forms. Like Zu's Indie music, it's about a more active than docile lifestyle. You'd expect their product and related self expressions to reflect that. In James Reed's bio, we read that "like Jason Serinus, I think most of the music made is crap but unlike Jason Serinus, I think all of opera is crap and not worth attending, let alone playing back. Effected voices feigning beauty and sincerity? No thank you." I actually feel similarly about that last part though not at all about the first. There's some fantastic music being made and recorded. One must only know where to look. Which segues into looking at the delivered goods.

Stacked Omen monitors for proper hifi in white-out conditions.

With less than 1/10th of the Radian 850 tweeter visible to the naked eye, a visit to their website is necessary to learn of its 2" exit, 3" voice coil, aluminium alloy membrane, Mylar surround and ferrite motor capable of 100 watts AES power handling. At 113dB/1w/1m efficiency and 16Ω, the Druid V high-pass obviously pads it down to match the widebander. Considering its pass band, this beast would be called utter overkill where conventional 1" dome tweeters reign in even €30'000/pr speakers. Clearly the Druid's HF are far from any tack-on afterthought. They're very serious issue taken serious. "Within our rather non-typical usage, Radian's costlier dome option did not sound as good even though it measures nice." So the V runs with the aluminium not Beryllium tweeter diaphragms.

I'd seen this German review to note how all their aluminium billet bits had been anodized in contrasting black except for the phase plug. This meant black trim ring, wave guide, plinth and terminal plate. My collage shows their photos of it. I'd given this brief thought, then held on to my hatred of black hifi and the resultant preponderance of clear-anodized 'silver' kit. Before I could lay eyes on my ivory not snow-white version, I had to crack into the thick but single-ply cartons. In typical Zu style—our Submission had been similarly packed to already survive two major relocations from Cyprus to CH then Eire—the Druids anticipated shipper abuse with foam-injected full-contact clam shell inners. The previous non-reusable protective peel over their lacquer had been replaced by soft cloth liners glued to the foam shells. Play hard, be built for survival was the implied message.

Due to the vagaries of freight and customs, one box arrived strapped and with corner rails as shown, the other without. Both speakers were flawless, each widebander protected by a black plastic discus. A small carton in one of their boxes contained sets of sharp and dull spikes, a cleaning cloth and minor Zu swag.

In the ever-revolving doors of a reviewer, the Druid V would first encounter the Soviet S.A.Lab White Knight amplifier before that amp's imminent departure to Mother Russia. In fact, that review's final chapter was planned around the V's arrival.

As to the recommended default floor gap for the ideal starting point, "1/4 inch or 6 mill is a good place. Less gap will tighten bass a bit and extend it a bit lower. More gives a bit more bump but can get woolly. That said, it is very amp dependent."

To set the stage for my Hunt for Green September—it was the right month and colour outside—we cross off one more contributor: the room. Ours at this stage was a 15 x 5.5m affair with 4+ metres gabled ceilings, plenty of windows and stone flooring. Given size and ceiling height, it's not your typically dry overdamped living room with pile-on carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookshelf-lined walls, heavily draped windows and overstuffed loungers. Longer returns for reflections particularly from the ceiling make for slightly more reverberant conditions. As a result, the sound is naturally redolent and more mixed with reflections. It shouldn't surprise that fresher brisker electronics and matching speakers counter that acoustic tendency. Voluptuous limpid very relaxed players escalate it. In short, what's a virtue in a far drier acoustic flips to become a handicap; and vice versa. To finish up this small but very big fine print, we remember. This 16Ω load halves the operational power delivery on 99% of all amplifiers. If you use a 120wpc transistor amp, it'll at best behave as a 60-watter on the Druid V. It could be less. This instantly resets what otherwise could seem overkill; and might eliminate what seems sufficient.