Vivid Audio K1 MK2 Floorstanding Speakers (Silver)

Stereophile Review by John Marks

I’ve had Vivid Audio’s Oval K1 loudspeaker here for several months. Over many years, the only other speaker brands I’ve written about as much as I have Vivid have been Wilson Benesch and Shahinian Acoustics, whose speakers I still revere and can recommend without reservation—to the right listener. But Vivid’s high-tech sorcery has raised the bar. The Vivids I’ve had here are among the best loudspeakers I’ve ever heard, and that’s a consensus that seems headed in the direction of critical mass.

Vivid’s designer, Laurence Dickie, is an alumnus of another British speaker manufacturer, Bowers & Wilkins, and was the chief designer of B&W’s flagship model, the Nautilus. Dickie’s designs for Vivid aim to achieve extraordinary performance by minimizing cabinet resonances and diffraction through the use of unique cabinet shapes and high-tech materials and fabrication techniques. He also aims to achieve uncolored, distortion-free sound by making all drivers from the same proprietary alloy, and by keeping driver behavior as pistonic as possible through careful driver and crossover design. (For more details of Vivid’s backstory, see Wes Phillips’s review of Vivid’s range-topping Giya G1 in the July 2010 Stereophile, and my coverage of their entry-level Oval V1.5 in my October 2010 column)

I was curious as to what Vivid would offer in the model above the wonderful Oval B1, which John Atkinson extensively reviewed and measured in the October 2011 issue. The B1 costs $15,000/pair, the K1 $25,000/pair. The only apparent differences are that the K1 has two woofers each on its front and rear panels (the B1 has single woofers fore and aft), and its cabinet extends lower to accommodate them. Correspondingly, the K1’s integral pedestal is shorter than the B1’s, its cabinet taller. The two models have identical tweeter and midrange drivers.

I expected to report that the K1 is just like the B1, but with more bass. While that’s true as far as it goes, it’s less than the whole story. I was taken aback by how much more I liked the K1’s midrange than the B1’s—and I liked the B1’s midrange a lot.

One track I’ve listened to often over the past 25 years when evaluating equipment but don’t believe I’ve mentioned in print—perhaps because it begins well, then suffers from overproduction—is the poignant ballad “Arrow,” from Cheryl Wheeler’s eponymous debut album (LP/CD, North Star W0001), in which she expresses the wish “to give myself as truly as an arrow flies / In windless skies.” Very nice.

 

A little more than the usual moon-and-June is going on here. “I’d fool myself and gladly, just to feel I was / In love,” the singer admits, as well as “Maybe love is not as gentle as my memory / Maybe time and wishful half-remembered fantasy are the greatest part.” In short, “Arrow” is that rare commodity: an adult song about love.

The track begins well, with two well-recorded acoustic guitars delivering both a heartbeat-like rhythmic pulse and a web of counterpoint to Wheeler’s pensively undemonstrative, folkie singing. All of which the Oval K1s just reveled in. However, perhaps out of concern that that arrangement would grow monotonous over the course of three verses, the producer ordered up some synthesizer and drum-machine effects that might have been with-it in 1986, when Cheryl Wheeler was released, but that have not aged well. Even at the time, some persons of discernment and taste were unsmiling. If memory serves, Michael Fremer, writing in The Abso!ute Sound, likened the result to doggie diarrhea. I wouldn’t go that far; I still listen to the track, loving the first half, then wincing a bit when the production loses confidence in the song and the artist. Wheeler must have thought so too; she remixed “Arrow” for her third album. In that arrangement, Mark O’Connor contributes a violin solo. (Mary Chapin Carpenter contributed backup vocals to other tracks on Cheryl Wheeler.)

Wheeler’s career as a performer never achieved critical mass; she remains a minority enthusiasm. Perhaps that was because, by the time Wheeler got a record contract, “confessional” singer-songwriters of the James Taylor/Joni Mitchell school were no longer the height of musical fashion; popular taste was moving toward bands whose music had more propulsion and surface sheen, and less angst; from Pet Shop Boys to Duran Duran.

However, the quality of Wheeler’s songwriting attracted enough interest that there were some noteworthy covers, the most successful of which was Dan Seals’s cover of “Addicted” (also from Cheryl Wheeler), which reached No.1 on Billboard‘s Country chart. There’s a lovely live performance by Wheeler of “Arrow” on YouTube, introduced by Chet Atkins, with a backing band that includes O’Connor.

North Star Records has closed its doors, but Cheryl Wheeler is available on the used market, and her third album, Circles and Arrows, can be found in the iTunes Store; its remix of “Arrow” is available as an MP3 single.

Another favorite female-vocal disc that showed off the Oval K1’s midrange magic—and one that I have previously recommended—is Mary Black’s No Frontiers (CD, Gift Horse G2-10002; I haven’t heard the LP). Black is more of a singer than Wheeler, in a broader range of styles. The title song and the eerie “Columbus” are excellent examples of her approach, while her cover of Bacharach and David’s “I’ll Say a Little Prayer” may strike you as charming or as off the mark. Regardless, No Frontiers, released in 1989, has aged well.

A belated new discovery for me is Charlie Haden and Pat Metheny’s Beyond the Missouri Sky (Short Stories), from 1997 (CD, Verve 314 537 130). I became aware of this wonderful recording while listening to Pandora.com, which I think of more as an interactive jukebox than an Internet radio station. I asked Pandora to create a “Bill Evans and Jim Hall” station. Because Evans and Hall recorded only two albums together, Pandora’s algorithms set about choosing music of the same vibe, which I’d characterize as “pensive but not necessarily depressive.” In short order I was captivated by Metheny and Haden’s restrained acoustic-guitar-and-double-bass treatment of Ennio Morricone’s “Love Theme” from the film Cinema Paradiso. I sure hope there’s overdubbing on this track, because I can’t comprehend one guitarist’s being able to sustain all those lines using only 10 fingers and six strings. The guitar sound had enviable bloom through the K1s, while the bass had very solid presence, with no trace of boom or hangover.

When I listened to Annar Follesø’s SACD of Ole Bull’s violin concertos, with Ole Kristian Ruud conducting the Norwegian Radio Orchestra (SACD/CD and Blu-ray, 2L 67), played on the Luxman D-05 universal player, the way Follesø’s violin “decoupled” from the midrange drivers and the tweeters to float in space reminded me of recent generations of Quad electrostatic loudspeakers.

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The Vivid Audio K1 is a pretty unusual looking speaker and Vivid Audio is a pretty unusual loudspeaker manufacturer. Based in South Africa, it makes all of its own metal drive units and encloses them in high tech cabinets with not a scrap of MDF or wood of any sort in sight.

The Vivid Audio speakers are designed by Laurence Dickie, the man who is responsible for the original B&W Nautilus, or snail speaker. It’s also a design that has had a profound influence over that company’s entire range since it was created in the early nineties.

Nowadays, Dickie works at Turbosound, the live PA specialist, and Vivid speakers are his only domestic creations in production.

The Vivid K1 was the biggest speaker in the range until the arrival of the mighty Giya. It stands 1.3m high on its moulded-in stand and while its slim shape ensures that it does not impose too much, it still makes its mark in the room.

The distinctive form is achieved using a cast carbon fibre reinforced-polyester compound for the cabinet. This is a material that is selected for its ability to be moulded into an acoustically desirable shape from the perspective of both stiffness and the removal of diffraction.

With a box cabinet, sound radiates not only away from the drivers but across its front surface until it reaches an edge at which point it diffracts or bounces off. The curved shape around the mid and high frequency drivers, in particular on the K1, ensures that this does not happen.

The final benefit from using this material is that it can be finished with almost any spray paint available on the market, apparently, the Korean Vivid distributor launched the Giya with a sample finished in a daring Lamborghini orange.

Like the smaller Vivid B1 the K1 has mid/bass drivers on both the front and the back of the enclosure, in this case four in total and these operate in a very unusual fashion. For bass below 100Hz, all four are in use.

For frequencies above this point, the output of the two rear units and the lower front unit is rolled-off leaving only the top front unit to produce bass and midrange up to 880Hz, where it hands over to the midrange dome.

Dickie calls this crossover a series parallel square because it maintains linear impedance across the band. It’s a good example of the ingenuity that he has brought to this and the other Vivid speakers.

The Nautilus influence can be found in tapered tubes that extend behind the mid and treble domes within the cabinet and have their ends covered on the rear side. By designing these domes with external ring magnets the rearward radiation can be absorbed by damping in the tapered tubes.

The two anodised aluminium domes are not hemispherical but catenary in shape, which is like a suspended chain. This shape, more precisely described as a rotated catenary, was chosen because it pushes the first break-up mode of the driver up to 50 per cent higher than can be achieved with regular aluminium domes.

The K1’s crossover is in the relatively flat base of the speaker with the signal being carried to the drivers via van den Hul cable. The base itself discreetly houses bi-wire WBT terminals and no fewer than five threaded holes for spikes, not something we chose to use, but hours of levelling fun could be yours should you feel the urge.

Sound quality

The first thing you notice when firing up this speaker is that it seems to have a lower noise floor than other speakers. Backgrounds are distinctly quieter. This makes no sense at all, as speakers don’t have a noise floor because speakers are passive devices that transduce electrical energy into acoustic energy and, therefore, should all be intrinsically silent.

And yet this is not the first time the phenomenon has been encountered so there’s something clearly going on here. Noise floor is not the right description really as it’s more like a lack of overhang. What you are not hearing is a box joining in or drive units not being able to contain resonances.

This speaker is so fast and devoid of box colouration that it just doesn’t join in with the music the way that so many others do. It’s a quality that’s so common that we accept it as part of the music rather than as a distortion. But, take it away and you know that you are hearing a cleaner result.

This seems to be most obvious with piano pieces, the first disc to be spun was one of the Schiff Beethoven sonatas on ECM. At this stage, it was only clear that there seemed to be less noise on what is an extremely quiet recording, which in turn produced a more musically engaging result. And also one with more dynamic range than is usually perceived, which is a sure sign that there is less noise coming out of the system.

It was not until we put on Keith Jarrett’s Carnegie Hall disc that it became clear that the piano sounded less fulsome and woody than usual, but also that it was more realistic in its solidity. After all, concert grands stopped sounding woody a long time ago.

This result could be interpreted as the K1 being short on instrumental timbre, but the sheer level of detail that’s on offer here rather rules that out. Each instrument still has a character, Avishai Cohen’s double bass is quite woody enough and for some subtle reason his playing, along with that of his two cohorts, takes on a greater sense of occasion in this speaker’s hands.

The longer you listen with the K1, the more you can hear and one thing that’s perhaps less welcome is that it’s highly revealing of the amplification with which it is partnered. We tried the Trilogy pre/power pairing that we also tested this month because they are similarly fast and have such great musicality. But they aren’t quiet enough, as the low level hiss that the valves produce undermines the end result.

On the other hand, Leema’s Pyxis preamp and Altair IV power amps, are revealed to be even better than we thought they were, thanks to the K1. They bring a degree of speed and transparency to the result that is in the very top league.

Clearly amplifiers used with this speaker have got to be quiet and need to be highly resolute. The same applies to the source. You may not need the very best, but you will have little difficulty in assessing the good from the OK. We got spectacular results with the EMM Labs TSD1 transport and DAC2 with the K1 and Leemas, a set-up that delivers digital audio gratification of the very highest calibre.

Discovering just how resolute this speaker is makes us wonder if we ever got the best out of the B1 some five years ago. Somehow we doubt it. The Vivid K1 is undoubtedly one of the finest speakers on the planet. Lord only knows how the Vivid Giya manages to improve on its performance.