Blast from my past – In 2005, Sean Casey's Zu Druid IV [$2'800/pr] was one of my early run-ins with the genre of filterless widebanders. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it put my ear/brain on a track which now prioritizes the time over the frequency domain. Today our home hosts a range of widebanders including Zu's Soul VI, Cube's Nenuphar v2, Mon's Mini, sound|kaos' Vox 3, German Physik's HRS-120 and Qualio's IQ. I reviewed and loved Voxativ and Lindemann speakers. Mind you, I can easily enjoy more classic two- or more-ways. In the end—instinctively perhaps but quite predictably—I simply gravitate toward 'enhanced' widebanders where either a sub fills out the 1st octave and/or a 'super' tweeter kicks in on a 10kHz+ simple high pass. With the wisdom of hindsight it's plain that the Druid shoulders some responsibility. It's a good reminder that personal notions of 'right', 'correct' or 'preferred' are a result of happenstance. We're shaped by our experience which relies on exposure. Certain chance encounters leave a deeper mark than others. Those marks then cause focus which attracts other encounters to deepen them. Et voilà, sooner or later our audiophile personality defines by what we like and don't. Had that journey been shaped by very different exposure, who knows what our audiophile personality would be now? Personalities are very real. But are they us, really? Reframed, if you believe in soul mates, is there only one for you from out of the billions of potential mates on this planet? If there are more, what does this imply about our sense of audiophile identity? Food for a philosophical rainy day's thoughts…
