There's no question that Vivid's designs have always been polarizing. But so too was the Nautilus when Bowers & Wilkins launched it. That said, some will like it, others won't.
Hi Doug! Hope you get the world premiere review of this beast, you've been a vivid Audio advocate for quite some time and I think you deserve to review it! Guy La Rue🙋
As Spock would say: it's only logical. Once you understand speaker design as profoundly as Mr. Dickie, the design is merely the application of Vivid fundamentals to the nth degree 😎. I'm probably simplifying the design process 'slightly' 😂, I'm sure this as taken them years. I really hope to hear this speaker at least once. Probably not at home though.
I heard some of the Kaya speakers at the Danish Hifi show at a hotel last year. I Did NOT CAME to hear or see Vivid. But they impressed me the most. Biggest disappointment was the flagship PS Audio. Really impressive and pleasant from a modest size. (And I don't mind 15" speakers otherwise)
We just learned the price is officially $465,000 per pair in the United States. When a speaker is priced that high, only so many units can get sold, obviously. But I think in the super-speaker realm, they'll do well.
@@dougschneider8243 I believe one of the higher end models in the Vandersteen range has a powered sub integrated into the speaker (linked to the cross-over). I think he is referring to that design. Not sure why because they are totally different design philosophies.
1:32 "bass section in the air" I'm betting the late John Dunlavy would have disagreed. I really want to see step response, impulse response, frequency response, and impedance/phase measurements.
So are the cabinets fabricated out of MDF and skinned in Fiberglass or Carbon Fiber? Appears so. The outer skin would have virtually no affect on the cabinet behavior. Makes them looks nice, though...
They often use vacuum infused foam composite sandwich construction, so the wooden prototype you see is what they use to try out ideas. So the wooden structure you see in the video has nothing to do with how the actual speaker is produced.
@@rgrost1 We figured it would be obvious that since he talks so much about development, that was a prototype. That said, a second video is coming where we do detail the construction of the various parts.
Are you a speaker designer yourself? Because it's always fascinating to me how, on the internet, someone will come out of the woodwork, slam the work of someone has been doing this 40+ years, as if they know better. So, what does your resume look like?
@@64fairlane305 I don't know if you're serious about your original comment, but if you are serious, you might want to take a step back and think about this -- Laurence Dickie has designed some of the most famous and successful loudspeakers of all-time, while you "did some decades back" and "learnt a few things." Hmmmmm....
@@dougschneider8243 I`ve learnt a"a few things" about how to treat the signal both on the acoustic and the electric side to preserve the original dynamics++. I still haven`t seen anyone else do all of this right even if some are onto something. I`ve had some jaw-dropping experienses when it comes to wiring and I`ve came to realise how wrong it is to build a classic paralell-walled cabinet and then stuff it with damping it like if it was a muffler. And a lot more. But I just built me a set of speakers "that could not be improved anymore" and decided to get off the train bcs I find this industry to be dangerously sick.
@@64fairlane305 You've obviously got a jaded attitude to this industry -- but it's hard to understand why. This is obviously an extraordinarily expensive speaker, but there are also extremely low-priced speakers on the market that are expertly engineering. But also, saying you built speakers "that could not be improved anymore" is a joke, because every speaker design is a balance of compromises -- every single one. As a result, every speaker could be improved.
