Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

Back when Steve Urkel (in the sitcom Family Matters, portrayed by Jaleel White) was showing everybody the best way to dress (and do property damage), my friend Ken Kessler, the high-level audio scribe at Hi-Fi News & Record Review, explained to me the secret of how to write a proper audio review: "Herb, the secret of writing an effective review is not to lose the reader in the middle." I took that to mean, put all the technological meat—and some tawdry stories—in the product description. Then sneak some spicy double entendre into the setup part.

Unfortunately, that strategy hasn't worked for me.

What I try for now in my product descriptions is to give readers a behind-the-scenes glimpse of my reviewing process, introducing them to the personalities of the people who create and support audiophile brands.

The reason I do this—aside from trying to keep the reader reading—is because it's necessary. Today, the websites of most audio companies are long on fancy photos and hyperbolic sales pitches and short on facts, relevant specifications, reasonable viewpoints, and prices (the real spicy bits).

To collect necessary data for my heart-of-the-review descriptions, I resort to what my friends call "Herb questions" via email. Sometimes, as in this article, I show the exact questions and responses. For me, the most interesting part of audiophile audio is the people, the ones who make it and sell it and the ones who listen and wonder.

Some spicy bits
When I began this review of Vivid Audio's new Kaya S12 standmount speaker ($6500/pair in standard finishes, stands $2000 extra), I knew very little about Vivid's renowned chief engineer, Laurence Dickie, or his industrial designer cohorts Matt Longbottom and Christoph Hermann. The main thing I knew about Dickie was that he was the guy who put tapered pipes behind the B&W Nautilus drivers. Then I remembered he designed the Vivid Audio G1 Giya speaker, which was introduced in 2008 and reviewed by Stereophile in July 2010. In a subsequent Q&A with John Atkinson, Dickie said that the G1's unusual shape started off as a form-follows-function extrapolation of the transmission-line loading of the G1, not just for the woofer but for all the drivers. Dickie calls his tapered transmission lines "exponential absorbers."

The Kaya S12, and all other Vivid speakers, feature a 1" catenary-shaped aluminum tweeter with a powerful, cylinder-shaped ring magnet that "gives the tweeter's back-wave energy free passage into its own exponential absorber." The open-backed tweeter in the little Kaya S12 is the same one found in Vivid's top-range Giya speakers. The S12's 100mm aluminum-cone mid/bass driver was also designed by Dickie.

In a series of emails, I asked Jim Noyd (Noyd Communications), Vivid's knowledgeable and communicative PR associate, the following questions about how the new S12 was conceived and executed. His answers have been edited for brevity.

Herb Reichert: Who designed the Vivid Audio Kaya S12?

Jim Noyd: Laurence Dickie designed the acoustically significant parts such as disposition of the drivers and the shape of the shallow waveguide around the tweeter. The rest of the form was handled by industrial designers Matt Longbottom and Christoph Hermann. The stand was the result of cooperation between Laurence Dickie and industrial designer Matt Longbottom. Matt wanted straight lines; Dickie wanted to add curvature.

Reichert: Where are Kaya's drivers manufactured, and by whom?

Noyd: The D26 tweeters are built in Durban, South Africa, using locally sourced parts in conjunction with Chinese magnets, UK-made domes, and Far Eastern voice-coils. The C100L mid/bass driver is entirely made in the UK with just the magnets imported from China, and Far Eastern voice-coils.

Reichert: What type of magnets are used?

Noyd: The magnets are high-energy, rare-earth neodymium-iron-boron. They are disposed as a cylindrical shell about the voice-coil to reduce local induction and linearize the gap flux.

Reichert: Can you explain what the "tapered tube port" is engineered to accomplish?

Noyd: There are tapered tube absorbers wrapped around the inside of the cabinet walls. These are an extension of the technology originally developed for the Vivid Giya, which was fine for the bass-only enclosure of the Giya. In the S12, the frequency range of the main chamber extends all the way up to the midrange, so the absorption needs to be effective against resonant modes in all dimensions. Sandwiching the array of tapered tubes between an inner and outer shell offers the additional benefit of creating an intrinsically stiff sandwich structure while remaining lightweight.

Reichert: Is there anything special about the S12's crossover?

Noyd: Actually, no. Because of the well-behaved acoustics of the two drivers and the resonance-free behavior of the enclosure, the crossover is not required to do anything more than divide the spectrum between the drivers. It does not have to equalize response peculiarities from either cone breakup or ringing in the cabinet. Of course, in common with all Vivid speakers, we use air-core inductors and, for the S12, we use locally sourced high-quality polypropylene film capacitors from ClarityCap.

Reichert: What is the optimum distance from the wall that the S12 should be placed?

Noyd: We have used them to great effect about 0.5m from a drywall and up to 1m from a solid wall, but I should always add the proviso that the sidewall placement also comes into play. So, for example, if a solid front wall is 0.5m behind the speaker, then the sidewall should be about 0.9m for an even response, assuming the speaker to be on a 0.6m high stand.

Listening
One afternoon at the beginning of my Kaya S12 auditions, I was trying out the newly installed, top-of-the-line Linn Sondek Klimax LP12 record-playing system (review forthcoming). The Kaya S12s were being powered by the super-transparent Pass Labs INT-25 integrated amplifier, and everything sounded so newfangled clean, superdynamic, and extra-vivid—and so completely unfamiliar—that I kept asking myself "Is this my system?" My brain would follow that with, "How fantastic is this Linn Ekstatik cartridge?," and "Has this system ever sounded this resolving?" And, "Is this the speaker I always wished for but never found?"

The Linn LP12 and the Kaya S12s were making my sound system sound too "new and unusual" for any kind of comparative listening, but I sure had fun playing Moondog's The Viking of 6th Avenue (Honest Jon's Records LP HJRLP18).

I'm very familiar with this record, but—wildly—it sounded like I'd never heard it before. I experienced several long moments where the whole of a familiar track would sound so different, I didn't recognize it.

Hypnotized and inspired, I listened to all four Viking of 6th Avenue sides, and at some point, it hit me: What was so different with the Linn and S12s playing Moondog was how intensely resolved and minutely detailed the reproduction was. I had never before peered this microscopically into the mechanics of the album's construction. Tiny sounds I'd never heard before sounded precisely rendered and meticulously presented. I could easily identify every strange instrument and background Foley noise. I could see how the mix was laid out and marvel at every little paint stroke of Moondog's surrealistic circus show.