Vivid Audio

VIVID AUDIO - AUDITORY ACUITY
(The clarity or clearness of hearing, a measure of how well a person hears.)

The Vivid Audio team represents 4 decades of experience delivering products
featuring more than just innovative engineering and bespoke parts.
Our goal is to produce the world’s pre-eminent High-end loudspeaker systems.

P erhaps it isn’t the most predictable of locations for suchan occurrence but over the last few years, in a leafy suburb
of Durban, something remarkable has been taking shape.
Born out of the enthusiasm and drive of South African and
British engineers, a new force in high-end audio has quietly
been building ground-breaking technologies into a range
of world-class loudspeakers. Almost every part of each
Vivid model is unique and not to be found in anyother
speaker. No element is taken for granted; innovation and
new methods of analysis are used to extract the highest
levels of performance from every component. VIVID AUDIO
takes pride in assembling all their own drivers and making
all speaker cabinets in-house.
Philip Guttentag, who heads up the Durban manufacturing
facility, first had the inspiration to get into creating high
endloudspeakers back in the year 2000 shortly before
meeting up with Robert Trunz, ex B&W president. It was
Robert who suggested he invite one of his old acquaintances
to join the team.
Based in Brighton England, Laurence Dickie had made a name
for himself as inventor of the B&W Matrix and designer of their
flagship Nautilus™ as well as the Turbosound Polyhorn™
and Dendritic™ horn systems forprofessional loudspeakers.
Still full of ideas for improvements to monitor loudspeakers
Dickie was able to bring a wealth of innovation to the
fledgling company.

If there is a central tenet to Dickie’s speaker design
philosophy it is to strive for freedom from resonance and
reflection. Resonances are the product of either structural
or acoustic systems where stored energy can oscillate.Reflection is caused by sharp changes in the path taken by
the sound. Very often the distinction between the two
effects is blurred but the result is an irregular frequency
response and smearing of the sound.
Our sense of hearing has evolved to have an astonishing
sensitivity to these effects as a matter of survival. There
are many situations where vital information is unseen and
we must relyon our sense of hearing. For our ancestors
this auditory acuity was, quite literally, a matter of life
and death. The presence of resonances or reflections in a
loudspeaker are what determines the 'sonic signature' of
that loudspeaker and for Vivid Audio the ultimate goal is
to help the clarity of reproduction by reducing these effects
to a negligible level.

AESTHETICS

Evocative ofthe special spirit of our newest design and proudly symbolic
of Vivid Audio’s African roots, the name Giya is derived from a traditional
Zulu dance. Wrapped within Giya’s distinctive shell-like appearance lies
an exceptional level of engineering detail and acoustic design.
Vivid Audio is an engineering led company but the importance of industrial design has never been far behind. While thefundamental form of our designs is driven by the internal function, the final design communicates meaning and emotion
transcending structure and material substance. In the overt complexity of 21st century technology a key objective is simplification.
Deployment of cutting edge analysis, design and manufacturing methods has facilitated the creation of loudspeaker systems
exhibiting the fullintegration of its constituent parts. Enclosure, stand and base merge into a single holistic form using complex
splined surfaces. This delivers seamless sculptures of seductive, sensual organic forms.

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G1 GIYA

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The Drive Units D26
D26 Tweeter with Tapered Tube loading
Our goal in designing the D26 was to create a driver with high...