Zu Audio Omen Theater

[gowyn]

Anyway I'm going to start a running commentary on the Zu Audio Omen Theater setup.

For those of you who are not familiar with Zu they're an American speaker company located in Utah. They build full range driver speakers that are quite unique.

So a little about my room. I have a dedicated man cave as my daughter calls it. 12x14 in the basement, all blacked out. I run a Runco 720p PJ onto a 110" screen. There are only two seats in the room. My gear consists of Emotiva UMC-1, Emo UPA-7 amp, Pioneer blur-ray, HDDVD, an old Pioneer DVD player used as a CD transport, an Apple TV and a Samson amp to drive the Clark transducer on my seats and also my SVS 20-39 sub.

For years I ran a cheap but happy set of BIC America CLRS62 x3 and three BIC DV5s for the rears.

Anyway I wanted to replace the speakers with something a bit better. I looked at Von Schweichert VR1, Tannoy DC8, Castle and quite a few others. Last year I ran across Zu Audio and instantly fell in love with the look of them.

Last week I bit the bullet and ordered them. Had them delivered Tuesday, most of them that is, the centre will be here next week I hope.

So the Zu Audio Omen Theater (American spelling I know) consist of two Omen standards, one Omen centre and two Omen book shelfs. I ordered them in Ghost Black.

So I was underwhelmed by the packaging on the boxes. See Emotiva use some serious double cardboard for their items, Zu kinda cheaped out here I feel, don't get me wrong it's ok just not as heavy duty as Emotiva.

So the speakers themselves are quite large given that they use a 10" driver. The standard are 12" square by three feet tall but the "book shelfs" are huge I feel, for a book shelf. 12x12x18"

How do they look in person, frickin' cool! The black is nice, not too shiny, a little grain can be seen on the veneer and those drivers! Beautiful..

Build? Solid, square, monolithic is how I would describe them.

Sound? Yet to be determined. They need to be burned in for a couple hundred hours so that is what I'm doing right now. Out of the box they were ok, nothing spectacular. Thirty hours in they are sounding much more open and dynamic.

My biggest observation would be they do sound better played loud, at least with my setup. I'm hoping and expecting that as they continue to burn in they will sound better at the lower volumes too.

Anyway, as they build hours I will update....

[pitbullmike]

Dont mean to high jack your review thread gowyn, just wanted to post a little something...

I purchased a used pair of Omens already broken-in from Audiogon, I must say I really really liked what I was hearing, I liked them so much that I called up Zu Audio to purchase a pair of the bigger brother Omen Def...They should be here sometime this week, cant wait Some people talk about the drivers being cheap and this and that, yet they have never listened to a pair

[eusebio]

you ever get the Omen Defs? if so how do they sound

also what did you do with the original Omen's you bought?

[jackfish]

If the Zu loudspeakers employ a full range driver, then why do they have a composite dome tweeter? Although, I with my compromised hearing cannot hear much above 10kHz and a driver which extends high frequencies to 12kHz might as well be full range as far as I'm concerned, there are plenty of younger folk who can hear into the 20kHz range.