M.O.C Show in Munich: Some Photographs of the Vivid Team and Distributors

Vivid G2 Giya by John Atkinson

My other joint best sound at CES was to the On a Higher Note room at the Mirage Hotel across the street from the Venetian. On dem was the G2Giya ($50,000/pair), which made its debut at the 2010 CES, driven by a Luxman stereo amplifier, and the Audio Aero La Source tube preamp/digital player, hooked up with Shunyata's new Anaconda line of cables.

The G2 has half the cabinet volume of the similar-looking G1Giya that Wes Phillips reviewed last July, and replaces the larger speaker's twin 11" woofers with 9" units. Whether it was the smaller speakers not exciting the penthouse room's acoustics as much as had the G1Giya the previous year—the Mirage's glass-fronted rooms may give spectacular views of Las Vegas, but they also flap at low frequencies—or the new front-end and cables, but the sound on José Carreras singing the audiophile classic Misa Criolla, Peter Gabriel's idiosyncratic but convincing reading of Paul Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble," and the unexpected combination of John Lee Hooker dueting with Miles Davis, from the soundtrack to the movie Hot Spot was to die for, the system simply stepping out of the way of the music. As it should.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/vivid-g2giya

La Source Ces 2011

Best sound at CES 2011 One of our listening room at CES with Vivid G2 Gya awarded speakers.

From Stephan Mejias, STEREOPHILE

Many of the products that fell within my beat were only on static display, so it was a treat when on Saturday morning I tagged along with Jon and Kal to the Mirage to say hello to On A Higher Note’s Philip O’Hanlon. Philip had set up a killer system comprising Luxman amplification, Audioaero electronics, and Vivid loudspeakers. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that we listened to four entire songs—this would be the most time I spent in any single room at the show—all the while enchanted by the system’s ability to impart the deep emotion of music. At recent shows, O’Hanlon had gone out of his way to impress us with volume and dynamic range, but halfway into the second track of this year’s CES demo, I knew Philip was up to something different. He was looking to impress us with nuance and delicacy. It worked. O’Hanlon’s On A Higher Note suite at the Mirage provided my favorite sounds of the show.

http://stereophile.com/content/leaving-las-vegas http://www.stereophile.com/content/vivid-g2giya

Leaving Las Vegas by Stephen Majias

PSB’s Paul Barton, proud designer of the new Imagine Mini. Photo: Bob Deutsch.

I complain—a lot—about Vegas. I have to apologize to my family, friends, and colleagues for all the whining I’ve let loose over the last couple of weeks. I’m sorry.

I should apologize to you, too, Las Vegas, because there must be more to you than all your neon lights and annoying buzzers and piped oxygen and smoky casinos, your fancy facades and empty promises—everything in Las Vegas looks beautiful from afar, but the closer you get, the uglier it becomes, the clearer its lies and flaws, the more readily apparent its cracks and hollow insides—I have to wonder: Are even the mountains a mirage?—your insulting buffets and gaudy theme restaurants and those relentless dudes who crowd the sidewalks with packets of coupons for a good time: Slap, “for you,” slap, “for you,” slap, “for you.” I would love to knock you over. You make me ill, Las Vegas. You really do. Where is your soul?

Sorry.

I was apologizing. I was saying there must be more to Las Vegas; I was saying I’ve been unfair. Las Vegas is home to many beautiful people, and for one week out of the long year, the world of consumer electronics gathers in Las Vegas to share its stories, to reconnect, to recharge.

We call it the Consumer Electronics Show. It brings me to Las Vegas. At a little after 7pm on Wednesday evening, I arrived at the Hyatt and was greeted in the lobby by our web monkey, Jon Iverson. This was the perfect way to begin the show. I gave Jon a bear hug and almost knocked him over. We settled into our rooms and later met up for dinner with John Atkinson, Kal Rubinson, Bob Deutsch, and Jason Victor Serinus. We exchanged stories, we took pictures, we talked about music, literature, movies, and we devised a plan of attack: John Atkinson would cover expensive speakers, Jon Iverson would cover digital components, Kal would cover multichannel for his April issue column, Bob would tackle low-to-moderately priced speakers, Jason would hunt down accessories and cables, and I would be responsible for lower-priced products. (Subsequently Tyll Hertsens joined our team with some well-informed headphone coverage.)

Somewhere else in Las Vegas, a wild-haired Mikey Fremer was telling jokes about Ken Kessler to Ken Kessler. And, high above the ground, Erick Lichte was on a plane, daydreaming about mighty tube amplifiers and curiously shaped DACs, looking forward to his sophomore year at CES.

CES represents the only time I get to hang out with most of these guys. (It was, in fact, the only time I’ve ever hung out with Erick.) And, for me, that’s the big story. More than for the gear, even more than for the music, I look forward to CES for the people.

But CES, like most hi-fi shows, is a party of compromises. We can’t hear all the gear, get to all of the exhibits and seminars, attend all the parties, meet all the people. No matter how much ground I cover, I inevitably feel as though I’ve missed more than I’ve experienced. (Music Hall’s Leland Leard tells me I missed out on seeing EAT’s Jozefina Krahulcova in a stunning Emilio Pucci dress.) In fact, I did not even get to see Paul Barton at all during CES, though I did get to hear his new Imagine Mini ($700/pair), which managed to pump out some of the most compelling sounds I heard at the show, despite its small size. It’s always a pleasure to chat with Paul Barton because his passion for his work and his intimate knowledge of its every aspect is always wonderfully apparent. Unlike Vegas’s Strip, Paul Barton is not about pretense.

As with any situation that is littered by compromises, we have to make the most of those experiences we do get to enjoy. An interesting consequence of my covering lower-priced products was that I didn’t get to hear all that much music. Many of the products that fell within my beat were only on static display, so it was a treat when on Saturday morning I tagged along with Jon and Kal to the Mirage to say hello to On A Higher Note’s Philip O’Hanlon. Philip had set up a killer system comprising Luxman amplification, Audioaero electronics, and Vivid loudspeakers. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that we listened to four entire songs—this would be the most time I spent in any single room at the show—all the while enchanted by the system’s ability to impart the deep emotion of music. At recent shows, O’Hanlon had gone out of his way to impress us with volume and dynamic range, but halfway into the second track of this year’s CES demo, I knew Philip was up to something different. He was looking to impress us with nuance and delicacy. It worked. O’Hanlon’s On A Higher Note suite at the Mirage provided my favorite sounds of the show.

I scribbled, quickly, to make it seem like I was actually working:

There is delicacy and detail with great breaths of air, and a sense of utter effortlessness. This is music and nothing else. Every word and pluck of string is emotionally evocative and entirely intelligible regardless of language or instrument. It all makes sense. And when Peter Gabriel sings, “Baby, don’t cry,” I want to cry. And when the music stops, there is nothing but silence—silence pregnant with expectation and desire for more music.

Which is how it should be. The best hi-fi does not replace music, but fuels our desire for the discovery of more and more music. Some of us judge hi-fi by how well it reproduces the sound of live acoustic instruments in any given space. Some judge hi-fi by how well it performs on the test bench. I prefer to judge hi-fi by how strongly it compels me to discover new music, and by how well it elicits my natural emotional response to any piece of music, taking me back to a particular time and place. I’m talking about hi-fi as an emotional conductor, hi-fi as a time-machine. That emotional response is the only absolute reference I have to rely on. Now, whenever I hear Peter Gabriel singing “The Boy in the Bubble,” I will dig back to the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show and I will call up the emotions I felt while listening to Philip O’Hanlon’s system at the Mirage.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/leaving-las-vegas

Laurence Dickie outside M.O.C High End Show in Munich

Industry Features: May 2011

Science fiction aesthetics applied to loudspeakers design? Vivid Audio may be one of the strangest business cases in the global hifi industry. Who could have imagined a short 10 years ago that it was possible to manufacture some of the most technically advanced loudspeakers in South Africa?

In the South African city of Durban, Philip Guttentag would seem a bit removed from the kind of handcrafter's tradition expected for most prestigious speaker manufacturers. If someone asked Philip about the handcraft heritage in this field, he might actually pun that in some ways it operates more like a golden jail - pretty but without real freedom.

Vivid Audio's goal for design is different. They never had any interest to compete for the glossiest enclosures with Sonus Faber or Triangle. The design of Vivid loudspeaker cabinets first and foremost serves acoustic functions with few concessions to glib style and aesthetics even though the final appearance is most assuredly compelling. South Africa it seems posed no problems to provide Vivid Audio with the qualified employees who'd prove capable to handcraft very complex enclosures and assemble proprietary high-tech drivers. Vivid Audio today employs a staff of about thirty in their Durban factory. Of course South Africa is full of contrasts. It is at once the most advanced African nation but also one with the lowest life expectancies for the entire continent. Very modern areas are built up daily but a big part of the population still lives in townships. South African economy practices deregulation yet black empowerment laws are without doubt the most constrained in the continent's industrial sectors. In one sense Vivid Audio is part of the diversity of this land of stark contrasts and paradoxes.

But "white papers in black hands" can in a short phrase summarize what Vivid Audio is on about. Their multicultural association results in a signature futurist cosmetic that shows no evidence of ethnic African identity. The roots of Vivid’s designs are really not African but far more closely associated with B&W's most striking Nautilus product ever. That's not surprising given Laurence Dickie's contributions who used to design B&W's drivers at their R&D facility in Steyning, England and now co-owns Vivid.

When the former B&W president Robert Trunz left the company in 1996, he emigrated to South Africa. Here he met Philip Guttentag who had been in the hifi retail business but hoped to transition to building high-end loudspeakers in South Africa. He suggested to Guttentag that they bring on board Dickie to design their drivers instead of relying on OEM suppliers. This became the foundation for Vivid's approach.

Joining forces with Philip Guttentag was an ideal career move for Laurence Dickie who could finally be involved in the design and engineering of products from beginning to end. It meant having his say at every stage of the development cycle from the acoustics to the aesthetics - and consistently for each and every model.

Dickie’s involvement with Vivid Audio occurred in 2000 after he'd set out to create a range of drivers for professional monitors based on his previous Nautilus work but with beefier power handling. When he was introduced to the other members of Vivid's expanding team two years prior, it quickly became clear that these same drivers would be eminently suitable for a new range of groundbreaking consumer designs they were already developing.

Vivid’s goal from the onset was to apply innovative engineering to loudspeakers that would visually stand out from the rank and file in dealer showrooms but deliver acoustic performance that would render them virtually invisible. Dickie still lives in the UK where he does most of the design work but he visits his business partner Philip Guttentag at the factory in South Africa every four months.

Over the course of the first four long years Dickie and Guttentag developed the products that would become the B1, K1 and C1. Because everything was done in-house, a lot of time flowed into learning how to do things at the foundation level like mould cabinets and design/build driver assembly jigs. One of the main challenges for Laurence Dickie was learning how to apply computer-aided modeling to the acoustic production issues and industrial design.

Vivid’s most singular feature is clearly its technical awakening. By contrast it is quite difficult to comprehend why speaker manufacturers today continue to design traditional parallel-walled enclosures when the technology clearly exists to design more advanced acoustically efficient cabinets. Is this linked to conservative consumerism, distributors stuck in the last century, lack of manufacturing expertise or an overall absence of vision and ambition?

Who knows? It's probably fair and accurate to posit that the high-end segment at large is incapable of financing and supporting aggressive research & development amongst its surfeit of assembly shops but few properly trained acousticians. This is particularly so in the loudspeaker sector. There most manufacturers play legos with OEM goods. Dealing in boxy cabinet permutations with one or more drivers represents untold combinations of possibilities already. But there are ways to do things differently and transcend this self-perpetuating golden jail process. That one pioneer should operate out of South Africa ought to give those pause who work in 'more advanced' industrialized nations.

Vivid Audio from the onset wanted to explore innovative technologies to transcend existing forms, structures and materials but not at just any price. Guttentag and Dickie were not particularly interested in authoring monstrosities like Kef's Muon which primarily serves as technological showcase concept. They wanted to deliver to the consumer market a full range of relatively affordable products. That’s why they invested untold efforts to extract the best possible performance from each of their components, using custom materials wherever applicable. It explains why there are no standard parts to be found in any of their loudspeakers. Every component had to first fulfil Vivid’s own demanding specifications and as the old saw has it, if you want something done right you best do it yourself.

The enclosure designs benefit from the development of cutting edge analysis and manufacturing methods. The goal nevertheless was to move toward overall simplification by merging enclosures with integral stands around a complex spine into singular organic forms. The research on form factors and their relationship to surrounding space is one of the most distinctive features of Vivid’s production. Though reactions to cosmetics are always personal, with Vivid it's mainly in the service of sound. Dickie’s efforts in large part focus on the cancellation of resonances and reflections that often drastically compromise the overall sonic performance. As a result of these efforts to keep such effects out of band, Vivid Audio early on determined specific design rules which largely dictated the outcome of all subsequent models.

Written by Joel Chevassus

To view the online version of this review please click on the following link:

http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/roadtourvivid/1.html

Sound Stage Global: Vivid Audio V1.5 - Tomorrow's Technology Yesterday and Today

The North American press can rightfully be accused of missing the boat when it comes to Vivid Audio, a company that does its design work in Britain and its manufacturing in South Africa. That includes us. Vivid released their B1 loudspeaker in 2004, yet we only reviewed it in 2010, and some other magazines are just getting around to writing about it. The B1 is still current in their line-up, and they have no plans to change it.

Why did everyone pass Vivid by? I have no idea what everyone else's excuse is, but I confessed in my B1 review that when I first looked at their products way back when, I thought there wasn't much to them. I was wrong.

The reason that it's so easy to overlook what Vivid does is that their speakers are deceptively simple looking. Their unique styling also makes them look more like a lifestyle product than a serious assault on the state of the art. Wrong again. The B1 is a class-leading loudspeaker, even seven years after its initial release. I attribute that longevity to great design work and the use of advanced technology that was far ahead of its time seven years ago and can still be considered sophisticated today. Most of the credit goes to Laurence Dickie, Vivid Audio's chief designer. Laurence used to be with B&W back in the day and was responsible for things like the Matrix enclosure and the Nautilus loudspeaker.

Despite being pretty much ignored in North America for so long, Vivid Audio has a vast product line today that tops out with the ultra-radical-looking Giya G1, which is priced at $65,000 USD per pair. In Montreal, though, they showed their entry-level floorstanding loudspeaker, the V1.5, which is priced at $7700 per pair and first came to market several years ago. Yes, it's kind of old, too -- not as old as the B1, mind you, but old enough. Philip O'Hanlon of On a Higher Note, Vivid's North American distributor, confesses that the B1 is better than the V1.5, but quickly adds, "And it damn well better be at double the price!" Agreed.

Philip O'Hanlon with the complete system

I haven't had enough experience with the V1.5 to know if it's a killer in its price range the way the B1 is, but I can say that in Montreal the pair sounded shockingly good being driven by a Luxman L550A-II 20Wpc pure-class-A integrated amplifier ($4800) with a Luxman D05 CD/SACD player ($5000) up front spinning Philip's discs. Kubala-Sosna supplied all the cables. The sound was remarkably clean and open, as well as viciously well detailed, which is exactly what I heard in my room when I reviewed the B1s. The V1.5 uses the same tweeter and mid-woofer that the B1 does, along with the same kind of super-inert cabinet construction. The thing is solid. But the V1.5 is a two-way instead of a three-way, and it uses a waveguide to shape the output of the tweeter to blend well with the mid-woofer. The B1, with its dome midrange, doesn't need a 'guide.

Admittedly, Vivid's speakers are rather odd looking, but their sound is spectacular. This is a company that has been employing tomorrow's loudspeaker technology for years, making it readily available today. Anyone shopping for a pair of speakers in this price class should hear the V1.5s before laying down big money on something else. Whatever you do, don't pass them by the way I once did.

Doug Schneider

Publisher and Founder, The SoundStage! Network

To view online posting click on the following link:

http://www.soundstageglobal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=134:vivid-audio-v15-tomorrows-technology-yesterday-and-today&catid=63&Itemid=127

Sound Stage Global: Vivid Revisited

Vivid Revisited

* Saturday, 02 April 2011

* Written by Jason Thorpe

Vivid V1.5I never get tired of audio shows, just as I'd imagine test pilots or (trust me on this one) motorcycle reviewers wouldn't get bored with their work. It's just so much fun. Not so much, though, for the distributors and manufacturers who put in long hours sitting in their rooms repeatedly answering the same questions.

As I exited my room on Friday morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in all my reviewerly glory, I noted that three doors down was the On a Higher Note suite, and it was open. The show didn't start for another half-hour, but Philip O'Hanlon had screwed on his bowtie a touch early -- perhaps just for me?

Luxman integrated amp

I entered and sat down in the central comfy chair for a listen. Doug Schneider went into great detail in the Best of Montreal 2011 section about the Vivid Audio V1.5 speakers and the Luxman integrated amplifier and CD player, all backed up by Kubala-Sosna cables, so I won't bore you with a rehash, except to mention that the Luxman integrated has an absolutely delightful '70s vibe and would look just smashing next to my lava lamp.

These relatively small, jellybean-like two-ways from Vivid Audio projected one of the best sounds I've ever heard. Where the V1.5s grabbed me was in the upper midrange and treble. Even when compared to ribbons and electrostatics, the Vivid speakers produced the most grain-free and relaxed highs I've experienced. While they've got plenty of top-end extension, the V1.5s made me settle in and let my shoulders drop as the music washed over me. No, this isn't hyperbole, but just to make sure I wasn't going over the top I brought in an expert.

Marcia in Vivid room

Marcia couldn't really care less about equipment, but she loves music. We rolled into the On a Higher Note room at 8:50 p.m., just before the end of the show, and Philip was as gracious as ever even though he looked tired. The long day was showing, but he smiled as I gently forced Marcia down into the sweet spot. Philip cued up Linda Ronstadt backed by the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.

I looked sideways at Marcia and noted that same sinking-into-the-music look on her face. Even from off-axis I could hear a superb sense of depth, with a layered orchestra lined up behind Ronstadt's incredibly real-sounding voice.

Next Philip played a Nat King Cole track, and the fun continued. I felt like we were looking right down Cole's throat, watching his tonsils vibrate. But don't think that this was a hyperrealistic over-the-top detail-fest. No, every aspect of the presentation was underscored with that relaxed, rich, enveloping smoothness.

The V1.5s are fairly small two-ways, so bass obviously wasn't their strong suit. But I certainly didn't notice any lack of low end, and the bass that was there was rich and satisfying.

The Vivid V1.5s retail for $7700 per pair. That's a startling bargain in my books, given how good they sound.

Jason ThorpeThis e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Senior Contributor, The SoundStage! Network

To see online posting follow this link:

http://www.soundstageglobal.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=141&catid=62&Itemid=138

Upcoming Exhibit

Vivid Audio will be exhibiting at the HIGH END® Show in Munich: May 19th-22nd May 2011

The M.O.C. in Munich hosts the HIGH END, our well-known, popular and successful specialist trade fair, which sets the tone in Europe in the truest sense of the expression. Some consider it to be the definitive source of audiophiles inspiration. Others see it as a business date of the highest priority. And both are right.

Vivid Audio will have a private listening suite and appointments or interviews can be booked with both Mr Guttentag and Mr Dickie on request.