VIVID AUDIO KAYA 25 & 90 STEREO LOUDSPEAKERS

Sound quality should be the criterion used to judge loudspeakers, but inevitably, since all the very best loudspeakers need to be present in the room with the listener, any prospective purchaser is also going to be swayed to a greater or lesser extent by their visual design. All the more so when the design is as far ‘out of the box’ as here, with Vivid Audio’s new Kaya range of loudspeakers.

There are three floorstanders in the range, and we have been listening to two of them — the biggest Kaya 90 (left) and the slimmest Kaya 25. Both will be likely to stop people in their tracks with their shining curves, standing like modern sculptures of sound.

And as with all Vivid’s speakers, they look even more impressive in their glass-reinforced sandwich-composite flesh, as it were, than in pictures. Indeed we reckon the junior K25 floorstander (pictured overleaf) may be the most attractive Vivid design yet, as it incorporates the key elements of Vivid styling in such a physically balanced and relatively restrained way; they are simply drop-dead gorgeous. Indeed the whole Kaya concept was to extend Vivid’s skills to sleeker, more compact enclosures (in relative terms), creating speakers that integrate more easily into smaller spaces — “perfect for rooms where the sound system is part of the space, rather than the main feature”, as Vivid puts it. The company enlisted the aid of Matt Longbottom and Christoph Hermann for their industrial design, both of whom worked at Lovegrove Studios for industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, the man