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In Reply to: RE: Found it posted by Dave_K on February 28, 2021 at 06:23:15
I heard the bigger ones with Momentum amplifiers. Bright. Not much bass, not cohesive. Reminds me of B&W. I don't get it to be honest. But hey they sell and not everyone likes the same thing.
Follow Ups:
I thought they were very good. However, they are very wide dispersion, so in a very live room I imagine the balance at the listening position could be too flat.But I'm with you regarding B&W. They have a boom-sizzle sound signature to my ears.
Edits: 03/10/21
When we audition to gear many things can impact the resulting sound. Audio Shows are piss poor because the manufacturer or dealer is at the mercy of the room with little time to set up. I have heard speakers I know and love sound dreadful at shows.
MBL at one show I had bottom 2 and it was CES where there are a LOT of speakers. At CAS a few years later I had them ranked tied for first. My own speakers sounded bad! Boomy, coloured... the wall was singing along with the speakers smearing them. Ouch.
Dealers are generally better because they have more time to set up. See the tape on the floor. The manufacturer selects the dealer. If they choose poorly that's on them.
They can also control the volume and music and what is attached. What was presented was sibilent with an air gap sound from midrange to treble that is pervasive on all tweeter on top B&W speakers. It's jarring to me. I think the Vivid sounds better but to me it's another in the lifestyle looks is most important and then let's try to make it sound good.
I try to be diplomatic because I know that down the line I might hear them with other gear etc and they might be great. But I suspect I probably won't given the materials and design. But it's been 3 times in 3 rooms with three systems. Meh. And the cost for meh is getting really high.
That B&W sound signature seems to be present in everything they've put out over the last decade or so. They're speakers for people who like a "smile" response.
The Vivids are function over form though. The shape is completely dictated by Dickie's acoustic design objectives, the first of which is that the back wave of every driver has to be absorbed by an exponentially tapered tube. For the bass drivers, that requires a big tube which determines the overall shape of the speaker. Secondly, avoidance of enclosure standing waves and diffraction. And third, dispersion matching.
He's getting better at hiding the tubes though. The Nautilus is one of the fugliest speakers I've ever seen. The Giyas are better, but still hideous. The Oval range was better still. But the smaller Kayas are the first of his Vivid designs that I could maybe own.
I agree with you about show conditions, especially when it comes to bigger speakers in smaller rooms. I've heard some really crap sound from very expensive systems. MBL is tough because they're omnis, so the room contributes more. I really liked one demo I heard with the little 121s though.
I never liked the Nautilus because it never sounded connected. B&W tweeters create a problem - then have tube tapering to fix the problem that is not exhibited by hundreds of other speakers. The tube tapering technology solved a problem other speakers don't have so it always seemed like a marketing shtick (like Bose) that could fill the pages of a brochure to sell to some tone-deaf shoppers or reviewers.I swear Vivid must have hired a B&W engineer if they too are touting the same ole Tube Tapering.
Please note this is a point in time commentary - I hated the KEF LS-50 and Blade speaker the first three times I heard them - the fourth time with different amplification I liked the sound enough to give them a try at home where they sounded much much better than at shows or dealers.
It seems we agree on B&W so perhaps I need to give the Vivid's another longer audition with better electronics. I never liked anything from Krell so that might be the culprit. And Momentum is just more Krell in more expensive (incredibly tacky) casework.
And I am reminded of a poster on these boards who hated my speakers - show after show he would attend and remind me how bad they sounded (2 years on forums ranting at me). Then he went to a show where the dealer set up makeshift corners out of better materials and he came back saying it was the best sound of anything he had heard at any show! Worst to first. I give him credit for being objective. Kind of like my MBL and YG Acoustics experiences. I saw the Vivid Oval speaker at a dealer here. Next chance I get I will try and audition them. Smaller speakers generally have fewer room-related issues.
Edits: 03/12/21 03/12/21
I swear Vivid must have hired a B&W engineer if they too are touting the same ole Tube Tapering.
Vivid was founded by the man who designed B&W's Nautilus, Lawrence Dickie.
I am happy to know I was pretty close. So the designer of Nautilus which is used on all speakers with an N at B&W founded Vivid and also use Nautilus.
So why did people jump on my initial comparison of the two brands? Tube tapering, Nautilus tweeters, snail shape looks.
There is a company called Fyne - I went and listened to them and I said - gee these sound a lot like Tannoy. Umm, they do. And the same story - an engineer at Tannoy leaves Tannoy and forms a new company called Fyne. I don't think this is a huge stretch.
Perhaps my comparison isn't too bad since I sort of linked the sound of the Nautilus designer at B&W to the Nautilus design at Vivid. I mean Nautilus may just have a sonic envelope that I happened to subconsciously notice. It may have been the look of the snail shape as well but I have seen several of those made in China copies over the years as well. Same/similar technology would logically create same/similar sound.
As I already explained, the two brands are voiced differently.
Post-Dickie, B&W has gone in a bit of a different direction. Even though they still use some of his ideas, they've gone in the direction of rising tweeter response ever since they introduced the diamond tweeter models. And in some models, like the 802 and 805, they've given them a little bass boost as well.
I agree with you that it's the sound that counts, and the technology is a means to an end.
When I heard the Giyas, they didn't sound like recent B&Ws to me. They sounded more like TAD. Or Magico with a little more bottom end and wider soundstage.
I am not really referring to recent B&W - I am referring mainly to 90s and 2000s B&W - I didn't care for them. The only post 2017 model I have heard at any length in a fair room is the 805. Your explanation perhaps help me understand why I disliked it so much more than I remember.
For me the Giya was brighter than TAD and Magico.
When I heard the Giyas, they didn't sound like recent B&Ws to me. They sounded more like TAD. Or Magico with a little more bottom end and wider soundstage.
Agreed and a bit more treble, too, but not much.
Laurence Dickie was B&W's principal engineer/chief designer back in the 1980s and 1990s. I don't know what his actual job title was. But while at B&W, he invented the matrix enclosure, and the exponential tube loading. He was also a big and early advocate of housing the midranges and tweeters in separate enclosures. Dickie left B&W in the late 1990s, but they still feature his inventions.Dickie's B&W designs were aiming for the typical target of flat anechoic response on-axis. But more recent B&Ws have featured a treble rise and often a bass boost. For example, here is the Dickie-designed 805 measured in 1999 vs. the latest 805 D3 measured in 2017:
After leaving B&W, Dickie worked for Turbosound for a while. They do large scale live sound systems. He invented their dendritic horns, which have equal path lengths from the driver to a line array of horn "mouths". It allows line array PA systems to launch a phase-coherent wave front as if from a point source.
After that he co-founded Vivid, where he has design authority over everything, including the drivers themselves which are made in house. One of his new innovations with Vivid was figuring how to combine exponentially tapered loading of the bass driver with a reflex port. Another one is the side firing bass drivers which are hard-coupled together back to back so the net force on the enclosure is zero. I'm not sure whether he invented the latter, but since he put it on the market it's been copied by the KEF Blades, Devialet Phantom, Kii Three's, and many subwoofer designs such as Martin Logan Balanced Force.
The idea behind the exponential tube driver loading is to absorb the back wave without adding any resonances. In a typical box speaker, the tweeter will have a closed back and the midrange and bass drivers will be open into the enclosure. The tweeter back chamber will be shaped to avoid resonances, either using a tube like Dickie does, or using a shorter chamber with a tapered point in the center that pokes up into the yoke. The back wave of the midrange and bass drivers needs to be absorbed by the enclosure. Without going completely techno-babble about it, the advantage of the exponential tube is that it's inherently non-resonant, the opposite of a rectangular box. The disadvantage is the difficulty of packaging that shape without making it look ridiculous.
Edits: 03/13/21
Well, I did a pretty good job guessing that Vivid had ties to B&W. I've been listening to B&W only since the early-mid 1990s and I liked them - Matrix 805, CDM2SE,(never liked the 1SE or the replacement NT) and 302 on the standmount side and 801, 802 for floorstanders.
It was 2001 or so when an 805 owner put me onto one of those rectangle boxes and comparing directly A/B against the 805 of that year(2001). The plain boring box(with tweeter inside the box) trounced them handily that I moved off my B&W purchase.
With B&W it is never "right" and that might be a reason why dealers love the sound - repeat business with people buying expensive lipsticks to put on the pig. Then they realize that Roseanne Barr will never be Audrey Hepburn and eventually they sell their B&Ws.
As for the designers - I don't know. Reviewers seem to help make them into big names but then I go back and listen to the products and scratch my head.
I have nothing against Laurence Dickie because I have not heard enough of his designs but I didn't care for the Nautilus - the Vivids have done nothing for me - the less said about those atrocious Devialet speakers the better. I think they're pretty cool speakers and I was excited to hear them - grrr. I am not surprised they are kitty-corner to the Bose and B&O stores here in Hong Kong - it's like GQ stereo equipment all in one section of the big shopping mall here. IFC Hong Kong. Devialet had to move to a different floor - the Bose competition was too great!
I read their (Vivid) website - it's all interesting technobabble - I love Star Trek and all but I am not really interested in how the sausage is made but how it tastes. In the 1990s they advertised the hell out of the tweeter on top and "kevlar" and it's all nice conversation pieces. Kind of like reading about Mercedes and how great they are until you drive them and realize how piss-poor they're made in terms of reliability.
I get an uneasy Rube Goldberg feeling when a very complex speaker or amplifier is selling that complexity as a marketing tool. Don't listen to the thing whatever you do - just look at these awesome pictures of the tweeter cutaway and the bulletproof Kevlar (see it's stiff) and the Diamond tweeter (nothing harder than a diamond and diamonds are "expensive" - see you are getting "value" for your money because we are selling you diamonds and kevlar (tough). No one bothered to ask if it actually sounded any bloody good). Especially when I go to a shop selling it and it sounds a lot worse in direct A/B comparisons than the simple Rectangle box with a manual that is printed from an inkjet with a staple in the corner.
That's when I realized that while I like my women slim and sexy, I like my speakers fat and ugly.
Your educated guess is amazing! You have also reinforced my view that the marketing people depend a lot on certain reviewers. Hope the recent events in HK have not been an impediment to speaker auditioning. Meanwhile I am dreaming of an AN.
Regards
Bill
Mebbe but I've had several B&W 800 series in the same room as the Kayas (not at the same time) and I definitely would not say that. YMMV.
Edits: 03/08/21
Only the Kaya 45 are available for me to audition, and they won't work in my room. The 25 might and the S12 definitely would.
They both exhibit the same issues. I have not heard them in the same room but in Hong Kong dealers are in the same size rooms in the same building with the same construction material. You can listen to one speaker walk down a flight of stairs and listen to a competing system. 20+ floors of this. The above was the last time I auditioned them. It wasn't good. That is diplomatic given the price tag.
Agree to disagree.
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