Vivid Audio
Vivid Audio Loudspeakers  Vivid Audio is a high-end loudspeaker manufacturer based in South Africa, with its roots based on one of the most iconic audio designs of all times, the B&W Nautilus. Their products are designed with a no compromise engineering approach using custom components built entirely in-house. With aesthetics as striking as the sound quality is pure, Vivid Audio loudspeakers are a visual and sonic tour de force.
Vivid Audio loudspeakers deliver a holographic acoustic performance, radiating sound while remaining virtually invisible. The soundstage they produce is extraordinarily wide, deep and 3-dimensional, but never exaggerated. Instrumental and vocal timbres are strikingly realistic, dynamic and delicate when they need to be. They are perhaps the most transparent, resolving yet unfatiguing loudspeakers on the market today. They refine sonic reproduction to a new level which encourages the listener to want more, rather than tire and need a break. The fit and finish are exquisite. With a sculpturesque shape that is rock solid, they sound every bit as good as they look. The surface quality of Vivid Audio loudspeaker cabinets is like that of a fine automobile finish, with a deep lustre and shine which can only be achieved through painstaking hand-finishing. Choose one of the standard colours to match the majority of listening environments or contact us to order a custom pair of speakers in a color of your choice. The Designer, Laurence DickieAfter Laurence Dickie completed his electronics degree at Southampton University, England he worked at B&W Loudspeaker's Steyning research & development labs. Although he started with electronics, his real passion was loudspeakers, and B&W recognised his creative talents when he came up with the multi-panel Matrix enclosure stiffening technique that has been used in all of B&W's top-of-the-line ranges since 1987.  The success of Matrix gave Laurence the license to pursue his ultimate loudspeaker, and this turned out to be the original cochlea-shaped Nautilus in 1994. Sales of this extraordinary speaker might have been modest, but as a hi-fi icon, and from a marketing perspective, its value has been incalculable. Not to mention all of the trickle-down technology that was subsequently used in B&W's Nautilus range of speakers to great effect.
Post Nautilus, after spending fourteen years at B&W, he left and started up his own operation called Blast Loudspeakers, working on designing his own ideal drive units, and doing consultancy for other companies, such as Blue Room and Turbosound. When B&W's part-owner Robert Trunz left B&W in 1996, he took with him the Blue Room sub-brand and re-established his association with now freelance Laurence Dickie. When Robert then subsequently emigrated to South Africa, he happened to meet up with a couple of guys he knew in the hi-fi business; he discovered they had ambitions to start up their own loudspeaker manufacturing operation, and were looking for engineering assistance, so he introduced them to Laurence. Laurence picks up the story: "In 2001 Robert suggested I should fly down and meet Philip (Guttentag) and Bruce and Dee (Gessner), who were based in Kloof, just outside Durban in KwaZulu-Natal. Both had worked previously in the hi-fi business but were now running a successful professional acoustic consultancy business so in a way our careers had followed similar paths. We got on well together and developed an immediate rapport. I was very impressed by the passion and enthusiasm they were bringing to the project." "Philip and Bruce told me about their intention to build a genuine hi-fi loudspeaker in South Africa. They showed me the attractive shield-shaped enclosures they had designed - a nice touch of Zulu influence here - and said that they planned to use OEM drive units. I pointed out the drive unit designs I had been working on could well provide a basis for what was needed, and we then started looking in more detail at the engineering involved." When Laurence joined Vivid, they used a Nautilus to voice the original active B-1 Loudspeaker so that could compare & contrast against the Nautilus. What was immediately apparent was that the new Vivid drivers that he had recently designed were substantially less coloured than those he had used in the Nautilus. Laurence set out much of his agenda as when he did that original Nautilus, and a number of the basic principles used then may be seen again here in the B1. For example, he believes in creating pistonic drive units -i.e. drive units that are able to operate in a substantially linear manner throughout their intended operational bandwidth, with mechanical breakup modes kept more than two octaves beyond the cross-over roll off frequency. The Drivers There are no standard parts to be found in any Vivid Audio loudspeakers. Every component is made to their own exacting specification. Most hidden away but quietly delivering a listening experience not to be forgotten. To this end Vivid B1's (the same goes for the other models as well) incorporate anodized aluminum alloy diaphragm drivers throughout, in a ‘three-and-a-half-way’ configuration, with tightly defined, fourth-order crossover filtering, so that each driver is restricted to its appropriate operating band. Laurence continues: "The two identical 7" bass/mid drivers with 5" alloy cones are mounted back-to-back here. They're mechanically coupled so that reaction forces cancel out, and the one facing backwards just provides additional bass - it's fed via a first-order roll-off operating above 100Hz. These drive units have a very open and unobtrusive frame, so there are no cavity resonances. The short-coil/long-gap motor section has some unusual features too, building on the work I've done to improve cooling and reliability and avoid power compression with Pro Audio drivers.  Vivid also uses special radial magnets, with the field running from inside-to-outside rather than between the flat surfaces of the ring. This helps focus the magnetic field and reduces stray flux, so that additional shielding isn't needed. The air beneath the central dome (within the voice coil) is ventilated through the motor, and the tendency for this to create a Helmholtz resonator is avoided by using a heavily perforated former for the 2" voice coil."
"Besides mechanically coupling the two cone drivers to cancel out reaction forces, they also use O-rings to decouple them from the enclosure above 50KHz, to avoid exciting any panel modes. The enclosure itself is moulded from a polyester resin loaded with carbon fibres, and its curved shape has acoustic benefits inside and out. The 7" bass drivers are loaded by twin reflex points, situated on the front and the rear (so you can look right through), again to balance out reaction forces." 
"The front-facing bass/mid driver hands over to a 2" dome midrange driver at 900Hz, primary in order to ensure that even and wide dispersion is achieved throughout the critical presence band. We actually use the same cylindrical magnet elements for this driver as we use in the bass/mid drivers, which makes life a little simpler. Inside the enclosure, a tapering tube transmission line is fitted behind this mid dome to absorb rearward radiation without creating reflections. An internal tapering tube is also used behind the 1" alloy dome tweeter, and here we've used finite element analysis to the magnetic flux. With careful magnet shaping we've managed to achieve an extremely high flux of 2.4 Tesla." UK HiFi writer Paul Messenger queried the need for such high magnetic power (most hi-fi tweeters settling for around 1.6  Tesla), and Laurence pointed to two advantages: "The poles will always stay saturated, which reduces the effect of the steel while the high efficiency also improves headroom and hence reduces power compression. And the use of a large padding resistor also improves the stability and consistency of the effective driver load on the crossover network with different power levels", he explained. Vivid's Aluminium Tweeter versus Diamond TweeterWhile the Vivid D26 tweeter (42 kHz break-up) is outperformed in the extreme high frequency response compared to other manufacture's Diamond tweeter (typically 60 kHz break-up); incidentally both tweeters perform well beyond human hearing. The Diamond tweeter is physically, considerably heavier than the aluminum D26, due to the thicker layers of diamond deposits that need to be laid down to achieve structural rigidity than the aluminum D26 The Vivid D26 is 7 dB more efficient than the diamond tweeter. Please review Vivid's Super Flux Magnet Technology employed in the D26 tweeters. In real life, the D26 is padded down to 89 dB in the B-1, K-1 and 91 dB in the Giya, so the tweeter's 7dB of extra headroom gives us far less power compression for the same SPL and as a result of the higher efficiency, the Vivid D26 is just ticking over compared to the others. Meanwhile the Diamond tweeter is run at or near its maximum output, so at high SPL or high transients, the diamond tweeter will perform in a non-linear fashion and sound harsh & fatiguing. The Products Besides the remarkable sonics, the speakers are drop dead gorgeous - truly functional art. The fit & finish is superb.
Below, you will find that Vivid Audio have a wide range of speakers to suit all sizes of rooms and while perfection is not inexpensive, the smaller speakers are quite affordable. Vivid Audio loudspeakers cover a range of sizes and capabilities from the smallest 16 litre wall mounted V1w to the 88 litre K1. Standing over 1.3m high the K1 is the largest of the Vivid Audio range to feature the trademark ovoid form. With its four C125 aluminium diaphragm reaction-cancelling decoupled bass drivers the K1 is capable of filing rooms of up to 200 cubic metres with spectacularly articulate bass. A 3½-way configuration includes the D50 mid range to cover the all-important mid frequencies to which the ear is so sensitive. Featuring an almost identical philosophy and driver complement as the K1, the Vivid Audio B1 differs only in the number of bass units, having just two mounted fore and aft in a reaction-cancelling decoupled configuration. The same seamless union of the C125 bass with the D50 mid and D26 high frequency units delivers a smooth listening experience across a wide listening window with ample level in rooms of up to 100m3 For those not requiring the level delivered by multiple C125s the Vivid Audio V1.5 family are two-way loudspeakers that achieve a respectable level into  rooms of up to 50m3. Being two-way designs the V1.5 exploits the benefits of a contoured baffle to preserve time alignment of the drivers and improve efficiency and directivity of the D26 tweeter. Ideally suited to boundary placement, the V1 series are the smallest in the Vivid Audio range. Like the V1.5, they are two-way designs using a single bass/mid driver and tweeter mounted in a sculpted cabinet. Being designed for boundary placement the V1 exploits the natural low frequency reinforcement that results to permit a reduction in the enclosure volume to just 16 litres. A selection of three mounting systems make this a versatile design equally suited to the surround channels of a home theatre installation or to a near field computer music system. 
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