December 2024

Vivid Audio Moya M1 Loudspeaker Review
Vivid Audio's sonic and sculptural masterpiece.
Review By Maurice Jeffries

  In mid-September, GTT Audio & Video head honcho Bill Parish invited an enthusiastic cohort of reviewers to his suburban New Jersey digs to hear speaker designer extraordinaire Laurence Dickie ruminate about his, and by extension, Vivid Audio's new Moya M1 flagship floorstanding loudspeaker (LD is the chief designer at Vivid Audio) and listen to the speakers. GTT Audio & Video became Vivid Audio's exclusive North American distributor on January 1, 2023.

Standing at over five feet tall and measuring 26 inches wide by a whopping 48 inches deep, the Moya1 M1 cuts an imposing and, in the exhibited Piano Black finish, truly intimidating figure. Weighing in at just shy of 800 lbs., the M1 looks like it should weigh twice as much. But owing to some deft design thinking, these unorthodox towers cannily offer sufficient cabinet volume to permit the bass drivers to plum the 15 to 18 Hz range in the low end without resorting to extreme cabinet "resonant suppression through sheer mass" strategies (about which more below). The speakers cost $465,000 for the pair if you must ask.

Both the designer and his magnificent new creation left me refreshingly and enchantingly smitten by the end of the event. Those audio older timers out there, a tribe that I unapologetically call my own, no doubt remember LD from his days at Bowers&Wilkins Loudspeakers, Ltd. (now simply Bowers and Wilkins). There, he designed the groundbreaking "matrix" speaker enclosure bracing technology, applied that technology to the famed 800 series reference line of speakers, and conceptualized the legendary Nautilus "enclosure-less" model. Dickie's revolutionary utilization of tapered tube loading on the Nautilus tweeter, midrange, and bass transducers to absorb stray driver back-wave artifacts in a gentle noise-reduction strategy signaled the arrival of a mature, pragmatic, and remarkably gifted audio designer capable of thinking outside the proverbial loudspeaker box.

Like many of you, I had seen over the past summer the enticingly placed Moya M1 press releases and watched the gorgeous pre-release teaser videos that appeared on YouTube and other streaming platforms with great anticipation. After all, learning that one of the founding fathers of modern loudspeaker design planned, finally, to introduce a cost-no-object flagship seemed, at least to me, roughly equivalent to seeing for the first time the mind-altering images of the cosmos captured by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope. The Moya M1 did not disappoint. Whether through its unorthodox but subtly seductive outward appearance and flirtatiously graceful curves or its full frontal "storm the gates" sonic performance, the M1 quietly but authoritatively shouts to the audio world that "I am here"!

The session kicked off with some refreshingly candid insights from the designer himself, the esteemed Dr. Dickie. LD first contextualized historically how the Moya M1 came to be, the role the speaker plays in the larger Vivid lineup, and detailed how his new reference builds on core technologies that date back to his B&W days. To paraphrase LD, the technologies employed in the new Moya transcend the mere technical and embrace music's living, breathing essence. LD explained that after B&W, he next worked on a series of high-quality drivers inspired by Nautilus but that boasted greater drive efficiency and lower distortion.

The metal dome drivers that he developed for B&W's path-breaking Nautilus loudspeaker would serve as the launching platform for his subsequent design efforts at Vivid Audio. (For historical reference, after a trip to Durban, South Africa, and with the organizational assistance of Robert Trunz, Vivid Audio was born in 2002 under the leadership of LD and Philip Guttentag). The upper-frequency drivers of the Moya are linear cousins of the first post-B&W domes that LD designed. The core Nautilus technologies remain, only now in much more refined form. First and foremost are those fascinating exponential damped tubes that function as pure acoustic resistors, these combined with port loading to achieve meaningful low-end extension from the alloy bass drivers.

With great enthusiasm, LD explained that the driver operating range of Vivid's latest drivers far exceeds the associated crossover settings, ensuring low distortion. Massive magnet structures coupled to drivers that essentially operate in a piston-like fashion over their operating ranges ensure commanding dynamic range and superior transient performance. The massive speakers, driven by over $1 million in associated gear (gear list below) play with a disarming clarity and purity that rivals any speaker that I have ever heard. LD frequently referenced his experience in the professional audio world as inspiration for designing a large, efficient, multi-driver system that speaks with a naturalness and dynamic ease akin to a great horn-loaded speaker but without that breed's tendency to shout in the midrange region.

From my vantage point, the Moya M1 captures these values brilliantly, speaking with the same overall ease of presentation, dynamic expressiveness, effortlessness, and power that music lovers often hear in the best professional systems.

Apart from the superb drivers, another element in Moya's largely unqualified success story owes to the almost cartoonishly massive but surprisingly attractive cabinets. The complete system is modular, with the various driver arrays placed in separate stackable sub-cabinets. The fanatically well-damped enclosures appear to have banished self-noise to the ether. From the center seat vantage point, the essentially silent cabinets allowed the superb driver array to deliver protean scaling and dimensionality, with unrivaled transparency.

Importantly, the bass cabinets do not require excessive mass to suppress undesirable resonant anomalies. Instead, Vivid and Dickie applied the firm's longstanding balsa wood core technology, upgraded here as a carbon-reinforced, balsa-cored, vacuum-infused sandwich composite to craft Moya's exquisite enclosures. The result is a superbly damped and quiet cabinet that LD argues rivals the performance of cabinets constructed from heavier materials like aluminum. Dickie further argues that the lighter sandwiched composite effectively dissipates resonant energy generated by the drivers far more quickly than heavier options which tend to store resonant energy like a battery.

Vivid Audio's Moya also earns, at least in my book, top marks in the style and speaker aesthetics departments. Far too often, audio functionality leads to boring, visually uninspired forms. I won't name names here, but simply urge you to recall the legions of otherwise superb, impressively damped speaker enclosures out there that resemble scaled-down versions of Soviet-era high-rise towers, not works of sculptural art. No one will ever accuse Moya of looking boring, boxy, or squat.

Musically, the Moya M1 speakers sing with a purity, coherence, and transparency to software sources that bring out the best in every recording I played from my reference list. The Moya reproduced vintage jazz tracks with all their vaunted energy, drive, and momentum intact. Whether playing analog or streamed digital tracks, the system also captured the colorations and warts of these older recordings scrupulously. Replaying a handful of tracks that Wayne Shorter recorded for the Blue Note label reminded me just how much I love recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder's ability to capture on tape the music's energy and bounce, and just how much I dislike his tendency to truncate bass weight, power, and focus. The takeaway here is that the Moya speakers hide none of this engineering-induced bias. Rather, it revels in the good and merely reports on the bad without editorializing either.

Vivid Audio's Moya tower loudspeakers reproduced newer musical fare as convincingly as I can remember. Streamed digital tracks from a wide range of artists (Keith Jarrett and the Standards Trio, Snail Mail, the Talking Heads, JoAnn Falletta on Naxos) told me three things. First, depending on the track, the Moya M1s image with the immediacy of a compact monitor speaker but with the scaling, power, clout, and presence of the best large floorstanders. Piano-fronted jazz trios, strings quartets, and intimate vocal performances hover in Bill's cavernous listening space totally untethered to the enclosures providing the same degree of "peer into the studio" transparency and focus that the best mini-monitors deliver in while sleeping.

LD confided that the Vivid design team voiced the Moya to emulate a mini-monitor's superb focus, coherence, and sense of intimate involvement by controlling the driver radiation pattern. To this end, the Moya M1 boasts a contoured radiation pattern of 180 degrees versus the Vivid Spirit's 270-degree radiation pattern. This makes the Spirit sound more overtly holographic and surround-sound-like, a perspective I confirmed by spending an hour or so playing tracks in the smaller upstairs Spirit-fronted listening room. By contrast, the Moya sings, as noted above, more like a highly refined full-range studio monitor on steroids. Inter-driver coherence was simply superb. 

A related strength that bolsters the M1's monitor-like purity owes to its superb midrange performance. A gorgeous rendition of Ralph Vaughn William's A Lark Ascending (Oslo Philharmonic with violinist Sonoko Miriam Welde) on the Lawo label sounded fantastic. The most striking feature was the ability of the massive Moya M1 coffins to capture the music's sweetness, delicacy, and charm with all the purity one typically associates with a small monitor speaker but with full range extension and gravity-altering dynamics. Wonderful articulation and instrumental bloom added icing to the musical cake. I still find it hard to believe that the M1 achieves this level of tonal purity, resolution, and dynamic ease with metal midrange and upper-frequency drivers but achieve it does.

Second, the Moya does bass like nobody's business. On classical cuts with genuine deep bass content, the Moya M1 gifts with protean bass reach that hits in the gut region. Organ works pressurized Bill's cavernous listening room with seeming effortless ease and grace. With each pair of bass drivers arranged in a "horizontally-opposed" configuration on either side of the bass modules, better to reduce resonant nasties to negligible levels, the M1 delivers both incredible bass power and reach and superb bass articulation, tautness, and precision. In the low end, the M1 rivals in power, scale, and sheer quality the performance of the best top-tier performers I've heard to date.

Lastly, the M1 simply sounds right. This is perhaps the hardest aspect of its performance to describe in meaningful impressionistic terms, but a quality that most listeners will hear and appreciate immediately. I think that this sense of "rightness" owes to the system's remarkable dynamic composure and expressiveness, its cutting-edge transparency, its impressive tonal and timbral accuracy, and the superb inner-driver coherence that belies the M1's multi-driver architecture. Like the great alchemists of centuries past, Dickie and his stalwart design team have managed to tease out of wood, carbon, aluminum, and steel something that resembles flesh and blood performers in the room. The results are simply stunning.

Anyone interested in the state of the art in speaker design owes it to themselves to hear the Vivid Audio Moya M1. Forget the cost, put aside preconceived notions regarding the well-documented shortcomings of complex multi-driver systems, and just listen. You will not, I promise, be disappointed.

A warm thanks, then, to Bill Parish and the team for arranging this stellar event, and a major shout out to Laurence Dickie for teaching me things about topics I didn't know existed. Well done, gentlemen!

Special Bonus: Greg Weaver's The Audio Analyst
Within Greg's E193, he highlights Laurence Dickie and the Vivid Moya M1 speakers. We're sure you'll enjoy the below video. Please be sure to like and subscribe to the audio analyst.

GTT Audio & Video System Highlights
Kronos Discovery Turntable: $115,000
Kronos Discovery Super Cap Power Supply: $24,000
Kronos Discovery RS Tonearm: $24,000
Kronos Discovery Rack: $18,000
My Sonic Lab Platinum Signature: $11,000
Audionet PAM G2 Phono Stage: $10,100
Audionet Ampere Phono Stage Power Supply: $11,200
Auralic Aries G2.2: $6,100
Master Fidelity NADAC D: $23,000
Master Fidelity NADAC C: $27,500
Audionet Stern Line Stage: $48,950
Audionet Heisenberg Mono Amps x2: $105,000/pair
Vivid Audio Moya M1: $465,000 per pair
Finite Elemente Pagode Master Reference Equipment Racks: $12,250/ea.
Kubala Sosna Realization Cables: $200,000 estimated
Kubala Sosna Xpander – Power Distribution: $6,500/10 outlet
Dejitter It Switch X/WiFi X: $4,250
Roon Nucleus + w/Sean Jacobs PS DC4: $10,000

Complete System: $1,239,100

Specifications
Type: Large floorstanding loudspeaker system
Frequency Response: 19 Hz to 42 kHz (-6dB)
Configuration: Five-way, 13 driver system
High Frequency: D26DLC – 26 mm Diamond-like Coated alloy dome unit with Tapered Tube Loading.
Upper Mid Frequency: D50DLC – 50 mm Diamond-like Coated alloy dome unit with Tapered Tube Loading.
Mid Frequency: C100SCu – 100mm carbon fiber reinforced alloy cone driver with Tapered Tube Loading.
Lower Mid Frequency: Two C175-76 – 175 mm carbon fiber reinforced diaphragm with 76 mm voice coil
Low Frequency: Eight C225-100H – 225 mm alloy diaphragm with 100mm voice coil
Bass Loading: Exponentially Tapered Tube enhanced bass reflex
Sensitivity: 93dB/W/m
Nominal Impedance: 5 Ohms nominal, 2.5 minimum at 40 Hz
Dimensions: 1,660 x 660 x 1210mm (HxWxD)
Weight: 346 kg (each)
Cabinet Material: Carbon-reinforced balsa-cored vacuum-infused sandwich composite
Standard Colors: Piano Black, Lexus Pearl White, Oyster Grey Matte (Bespoke PPG colors available)
Price: $465,000 per pair

Company Information
Vivid Audio
6 Star Road, Partridge Green
West Sussex, RH13 8RA
UK

Website: VividAudio.com

USA Distributor
GTT Audio 
356 Naughright Rd.
Long Valley, NJ, 07853 

Voice: (908) 850-3092
Website: GTTAudio.com