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Posted - 2013/06/25 : 15:05:33
http://www.hifiplus.com/articles/best-of-the-best-vivid/?utm_campaign=Hi-Fi
BEST OF THE BEST - VIVID AUDIO LOUDSPEAKERS
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by Jason Kennedy | Jun 24, 2013
Categories: Floorstanding
Looking back at the mountain of products that I've reviewed since Hi-Fi Plus was launched does not make it easy to pick one that could be said to have had the greatest impact on the last fourteen years. But a few come to mind; the Townshend Seismic Stand equipment support that started a trend away from spiking and toward genuine isolation, or the consistently remarkable speakers coming out of PMC that have made a very strong case for transmission line loading, also sadly missed is the Resolution Audio Opus 21, a design that showed the musical potential of CD.
But then I considered the way that loudspeakers have been progressing over the period and had to plump for one of the Vivid Audio models. These speakers were among the first to take a serious look at controlling cabinet resonance by a means other than mass. Designed by Laurence Dickie who built the Nautilus for Bowers & Wilkins and created a legacy for that company in the process, the Vivid speakers were built out of GRP to produce a very stiff cabinet at audio frequencies that had the advantage of being light as well. Low mass restricts the ability to store energy, in high mass systems that energy that usually appears as sound rather later than the sound you want to hear and blurs the result. Dickie also designed all of the drivers for the Vivid speakers and challenged conventional thinking there as well, in this respect his speakers remain a portent for the future, a time when others might consider that the perfect shape for a dome might not be hemispherical after all but catenary as is the case with Vivid's drivers. The elegant shape of Vivid cabinets is not merely styling it is a means of avoiding reflections within and without, so standing waves are broken up internally and high frequencies have no edges to diffract from on the outside.
But it's the way that so many have taken up the cause of cabinet control that proves this company's foresight. Nowadays it's all the rage, Q-Acoustics is the latest to come my way, its Concept 20 cabinet is made up of two MDF layers with a flexible adhesive between them, that's a £350 speaker by the way. Wilson benesch uses carbon fibre in its 'bigger' models and energy absorbers in the Square range, likewise Boston Acoustics current M-Series speakers use constrained layer damping to kill of cabinet resonance. The list goes on but there's no denying the trend. In truth there's only so much further you can get with refinements to driver technology because so much has been done in this field already, catenary domes aside. So cabinet improvement is the area where speakers have the most potential for reducing coloration. Cabinet resonance is the dark matter of high fidelity, if it is identified then we get considerably closer to our goal.
For Dickie who had worked on precisely this problem with the Nautilus back in the early nineties it was a logical step but the way that it was achieved is far from straightforward and must have taken a lot of R&D to get right. The Vivid cabinets as seen on the Giya range are built out of two skins of GRP (glass reinforced plastic) that sandwich a solid bamboo core. This core is made up of hundreds of hexagonal slices of bamboo that are hand placed on the inner skin prior to being wrapped by the outer. It seems insanely time consuming and explains why the Vivid speakers are hardly inexpensive, but as a means of creating a 'quiet' cabinet is extremely effective. I have reviewed two Giya models, the G1 and smaller G2 as well as the relatively compact B1 and Ki and in each case the lack of cabinet character has been evident by virtue of the fact that the speakers sound so clean, even handed and revealing. Not to mention extremely entertaining, this isn't one of those products that is so neutral it kills the music it's one of the far rarer types that lets you genuinely hear more of the music and less of the hardware in a precisely timed, dynamic and gripping fashion if the ancillaries allow it to do so.
Looking back through my reviews of Vivid speakers it's interesting to note just how much of an influence the amplifiers being used at the time had on the result. These are phenomenally revealing loudspeakers so the quality of amp and source is magnified. I got very good results with all manner of equipment from Naim NAP 500 and Digital Do-Main's short lived B-1a to Leema's big Pyxis pre and Altair monoblocks but in each instance the character of the amplifier was obvious. I remember that one of my earlier Vivid reviews was undermined by the fact that I couldn't put my hands on an amplifier that really did them justice. This is a natural state of affairs for a transparent loudspeaker but a warning that should you audition a pair don't assume that the speaker is the dominant source of character within the system. As this is so often the case it's something that tends to be presumed but that is always dangerous and doubly so here. I would love to hear a pair of Giya with the Constellation Audio Virgo and Centaur that I reviewed recently, these amps have a combination of power, transparency and pace that would let the Vivids strut their stuff in no uncertain terms.
What always strikes me about these speakers is their effortlessness. This is something that you get with some high sensitivity speakers but rarely in the context of an even tonal balance. The Vivids manage to not sound, to produce music without getting in the way in such a fashion as to make the sound totally free of mechanical qualities. That in my view is what high fidelity is all about, equipment that can sublimate itself in service to the music. Vivids do this to a greater extent than all other speakers and the industry still has a lot to learn from the way they have been designed. The cabinet material plays its part but so does the shape and the drive units within it, there is nothing conventional about these speakers and this fact makes them as relevant to what is coming in future as it has to products of the past.
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