LOUDSPEAKERS
V
ivid Audio’s loudspeakers not only
look different, they sound different
too, something that Vivid Audio’s lead
designer Laurence Dickie knows all
too well. But since that’s what they said about
B&W’s flagship Nautilus — which he also
designed — he’s not too concerned.
EQUIPMENT
Putting aside for a moment the industrial design
of the unconventional curvy cabinet, the acoustic
design of the Vivid Audio Kaya 90 is also
unconventional, because it’s a three-way, six-driver
bass reflex system using four 125mm-diameter
alloy-coned bass drivers, a single 100mm-diameter
alloy cone midrange driver and a 26mm alloy
dome tweeter. Both the midrange driver and
the tweeter are ‘loaded’ at the rear by tapered
tubes, and the two bass reflex ports are also loaded
by exponentially tapered tubes. The purpose of
these tubes is to eliminate destructive resonances
and reflections.
The four bass drivers are mounted in pairs on
opposite sides of the cabinet. Vivid Audio calls
them ‘reaction-cancelling drivers’ but it’s actually
the way the drivers are mounted that results in the
‘reaction-cancelling’ effect. The term describes a
driver mounting arrangement that not only means
the reactive force from the drivers is cancelled but
also means that no vibration is transferred to the
cabinet from the drivers.
As with all Vivid Audio drivers, the Kaya 90’s
100mm midrange is made in-house by Vivid
Audio itself, using radially-polarised neodymiumSTEREO LOUDSPEAKERS
VIVID AUDIO
K AYA 90
magnets. This makes for an expensive build, but
has many advantages, including being able to use
a more powerful magnetic material, the ability to
focus the magnetic field more intensely in the gap,
and the very low levels of magnetic leakage.
The D26 tweeter in the Kaya 90 has a 26mm
anodised aluminium dome with a catenary — rather
than a hemispherical — dome mounted atop an
edge-wound aluminium voice coil that is driven
by eight radially polarised neodymium iron boron
magnets. The magnetic flux density in the gap that
results is so powerful (2.4 teslas) that Vivid Audio
had to commission Ferrotec Corp (USA) to create
a special formulation specifically for the D26.
Catenary domes are more difficult to manufacture
than hemispheric domes, but are much stronger.
But let’s get back to the curvy nature of the
Kaya 90’s enclosure (and, indeed all Vivid Audio
loudspeaker enclosures). There are sound acoustic
reasons for building loudspeaker cabinets from
curved panels, based on solid research that goes all
the way back to Harry F. Olson, who wrote the
definitive work on loudspeaker enclosure design.
Olson proved that all other things being equal,There’s no mistaking a Vivid Audio loudspeaker design — but it’s
not only their appearance that marks them out. We reckon you
could pick them just as easily blindfolded, from their sound quality.