Vivid Kaya 45
For a decade, the sound of the Vivid Giya loudspeakers, which I had heard only at CES in private demonstration suites, beguiled me. My positive impressions were completely consistent from one show to the next—but then, so were the host and the surroundings. I had to wonder how much those factors contributed to my impressions.
I had a similarly positive reaction to the sound of the new Vivid Kaya speakers in a tiny demo room on the show floor at the 2018 High End Show in Munich. Smaller and simpler in appearance than Vivid’s flagship Giyas, the Kayas are also significantly less expensive, even though they incorporate the same major design features. When Art Dudley and I sat down to talk about the Kayas with Vivid’s Laurence Dickie and Philip Guttentag, I pushed to get a pair for review.
After dallying, as a young man, with KEF B139 bass drivers in transmission lines, Dickie went to work at Bowers & Wilkins and developed a means of loading drivers with exponential tapered tubes. This culminated, in 1991, with the prototype of the B&W Nautilus loudspeaker system, which saw its commercial release in 1993, and which remains an iconic product for B&W. Dickie left B&W in 1997, and, in 2004, after a few years working overseas, co-founded Vivid Audio. There he combined his commitment to the use of exponential tapered tube loading with the use of
