Laurence Dickie, the speaker engineer behind the iconic Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus and now the technical director of Vivid Audio which he founded, apparently came up with what his dream loudspeakers would be during the pandemic lockdown and has now made it real.
Dubbed the Moya M1, the resulting design is a five-way, thirteen-driver design including eight side-firing, proprietary bass drivers. Each C225-100H woofer sports a 22.5cm alloy diaphragm with a 10cm voice coil in a 45 mm gap rare-earth radial magnet system. Set up in horizontally opposed pairs, their magnets are united by a substantial steel tie-bar to eliminate cabinet vibration and minimise any turbulent effects that may limit low-end linearity. Furthermore, these drivers sit within four extensively braced bass enclosures, each with aerodynamically optimised reaction-cancelling ports.
Meanwhile, the mids are presented via two front-firing 17.5cm carbon fibre-reinforced mid/bass drivers, above which sits a single 10 cm carbon fibre-reinforced mid-range driver. Finally, two Diamond-Like Coated (DLC) aluminium alloy modules – a 50mm upper midrange dome and a 26mm tweeter round off things on the uppermost band. Of course, the Dickie-signature tapered tube loading is present here. This design feature prevents sound waves at the back of the drivers from distorting the audio, as introduced in the now legendary-but-still-in-production Naitulus, and remains contemporary in every Vivid Audio speaker.
We are told that "the contrasting properties between the DLC and the aluminium substrate heightens shear losses and significantly dampens the ‘Q’ of the break-up".
Every driver has been developed (and optimised) from the South African-based brand's existing signature carbon-reinforced sandwich composite. Moreover, they're hand-manufactured in-house, too. Also built in-house are the computer-optimised, passive, hard-wired filters promising remarkable accuracy and phase matching.
The Moya M1 use a passive, five-way, fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley crossover in three parts, with the mid and upper sections placed well away from the bass ones.
The Vivid Audio Moya M1 is set to launch later this year, which marks Dickie's 50th anniversary in speaker design. Expect to part with around £400,000 per pair.
Visit Vivid Audio for more information
Posted in: Hi-Fi | StereoLUX!
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