Vivid Audio speakers, my experience

So I am sharing my experiences with this company, their product and services for those who may be interested or on the fence.

For those who do not know Vivid Audio, it is a speaker company based in South Africa, founded by previous B&W engineer Laurence Dickie who designed the famous 800 Nautilus series speakers and their distributor Philip Gottentag. Vivid speakers are unique to say the least.

I have a pair of B-1 speakers and they sounded good. While their products work, it is all good and wonders. But I have so disenchanted by my recent experience with their US customer service. I am quitting this company altogether.

The drivers on the B-1 (especially the tweeters) are completely exposed and easily subject to damages from, say, children’s poking fingers. That happened to my drivers. Also, one of the speakers started producing a distortion in the upper bass/lower mid range. I sort of traced the problem to one of the woofers. I contacted Vivid customer service in US about replacing these drivers. They put me in touch with one of their dealers (Supra HiFi, be aware!) who quoted me astronomical prices (so high that is about 70% of the MSRP for the 10 year old speakers). I did some research and found other people got their replacement for way lower prices. So I reached out to the Vivid Audio in South Africa. So it turns out Scott from Supra HiFi quoted me about 5x the correct prices!

So Vivid pointed me to their US rep again who was supposed to get the replacement drivers from Vivid to me. Because Vivid has no service facility in the US, they cannot provide any technical services like diagnosis, let alone repairs. So the customer needed to replace the drivers themselves, which is fine. But because I am not a professional, I may not have diagnosed the full scope of the problem with my speakers. So I asked their US rep Todd whether I could return the undamaged woofer to him in the case if replacing the driver alone does not fix the speakers. He said no because he was concerned about reselling the driver if it was returned. I was shocked. Since Vivid has not service capacity in the US, I though this is the minimum they can do to help. I was so disheartened by this response that I did not reply in a month because I was giving up on this company.

Today, I finally reminded myself to write the email to the owner and their US rep that I am quitting this company.

Anyway, this is my experience. YMMV.