Based on the "findings" on a recent thread (see below), on the differences between the Vivid B1 & B1 Decade, here's how I would cherry pick that information to highlight the differences. Also noted is a smattering of comparison to the Decades, its second highest sibling from the G-series, the G2. ( Reference is also made to KEF's Blade II). This is a quick edited overview of all three speakers taken from Doug Sneider's review(see blow):
"Late to the party but at last intrigued, I reviewed the Oval B1 later that year. When I did, I realized that it had been an oversight on my part not to look at their speakers before -- the Oval B1 wasn’t perfect, but its sensational sound made it my favorite speaker for under $20,000 USD per pair. (The retail price was then $15,000/pair; it’s now $18,000/pair.)......
Description
Laurence Dickie told me that the first choices he made in the redesign of the Oval B1 were of what would remain unchanged: its overall shape of an oval main cabinet permanently affixed to a stand and base, the whole looking vaguely like a tennis racket; and its three-and-a-half-way driver configuration of front-firing tweeter, midrange, and woofer, with a second woofer firing to the rear.
Then came the differences. The B1’s entire cabinet, stand, and base are made of a mineral-filled resin composite; in the B1D, that material is used only for the stand and base. The B1D’s cabinet is made of the same materials as the Giya series: vacuum-infused, fiberglass-reinforced resin sandwiching a balsa core. The resulting light, stiff cabinet has a much higher resonant frequency than the B1’s, meaning that any cabinet resonances are even less likely to be heard when the speaker is reproducing music. According to Dickie, the switch to the newer, far more labor-intensive materials accounts for most of the $10,000 difference in price between the B1 and B1D......
The B1D uses Vivid’s D26 1” (26mm) dome tweeter and D50 2” (50mm) dome midrange driver, both of which are used in the B1 and are here crossed over at the same frequency: 3500Hz. But instead of being left unprotected, as in the B1, each driver has its own permanently affixed grille.......
....The B1D’s two C125 woofers have 5” (125mm) aluminum-alloy cones and include improvements over the woofers used in the B1. (Including the surround, the driver is actually about 6.5” across.) The main difference is that Dickie has moved the magnet from the rear so that the magnet now surrounds the coil.......
..As in the B1, the B1D’s rear woofer operates with full force below 100Hz to supplement the front woofer in the lowest frequencies, but is rolled off above that frequency. The front woofer operates throughout the bass range until it hands off to the midrange at 880Hz. The B1D’s bass extension is specified as 35Hz...
The B1D’s new woofers, and the redesign of the crossover to accommodate them, produced profoundly different results when we had the speaker measured in the anechoic chamber at Canada’s National Research Council. In the charts plotted for the measurements of the original B1, a large cancellation of about 8dB was visible just below 400Hz when the microphone was placed directly in front of the speaker, on the tweeter axis -- the result of the outputs of the front and rear woofers summing out of phase. But that cancellation didn’t carry the entire way around the speaker. When the mike was pointed at the middle of either side of the speaker, from the same distance away as when measured on axis to the tweeter, the woofers’ cancellation was almost completely eliminated...
...Our measurements show that his work was worthwhile; the cancellation on axis is now only about 2dB -- a reduction of 6dB, which is significant...
Sound
....I don’t remember exactly how widely and deeply the B1s presented the soundstages of the recordings I’ve long used as references for that quality, which include Ennio Morricone’s score for the film The Mission (16/44.1 FLAC, Virgin) and the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session (16/44.1 FLAC, RCA). But I do remember that I was impressed enough that I wrote this about The Mission: “I heard the voices more distinctly through the B1 than through any other speaker I’ve reviewed.” Suffice it to say that all that clarity was still there with the B1Ds, along with a soundstage with the best combination of width, depth, and precise focus of aural images of instruments and voices on that soundstage that I have experienced....
....
The B1’s reproduction of bass is the Achilles’ heel of that otherwise excellent speaker. I found the B1’s upper bass a little too boosted, and the entire lower-to-upper-bass region not quite as tight, detailed, and clear as the frequencies above. That lack of tightness, detail, and clarity created a noticeable lack of integration between the outputs of the front woofer and midrange, and a slight lack of coherence across the audioband -- the quality of output of all the B1’s drivers wasn’t quite identical. If I’d had to assign letter grades, I’d have given the B1’s tweeter and midrange an A, the woofers a B. Those woofers needed to catch up.
They have. As mentioned above, the shape of the ports, the crossover, and the woofers themselves are all different in the Oval B1 Decade. The results: no boost in the upper bass, a little more extension in the lower bass, far more detail from the lowest bass through lower midrange, and an ideal blend of the outputs of all four drivers, from lowest lows to highest highs.....
....the transition from midrange driver to front woofer, and then to the rear woofer’s supplementing of the front, were utterly seamless -- which hadn’t been the case with the B1s.
So, unlike with the B1, I have no caveats about the Oval B1 Decade’s bass -- except that the B1D didn’t have much bass output below about 40Hz. This shouldn’t be surprising from a speaker with just two small woofers in a fairly small cabinet -- the B1D hinted at frequencies in the bottom octave of the audioband that it just couldn’t hit......
(Full-range requires bass extension to 20Hz, the bottom of the audioband, at output levels that match the upper bass, midrange, and above.)
Of course, Vivid’s Giya G2 can also reach lower than the B1D -- down to at least 30Hz, also with tremendous authority. That’s where the B1D mostly fell short of the G2: in the deep bass. And when push comes to shove, I believe the G2 can play a bit louder than the B1D....
...The B1Ds’ sound held together fine under such punishment, but in some extremely loud passages I could sense I shouldn’t push them further -- the subtlest hints of high-frequency compression and hardness were setting in, signs that if I turned them up much louder, serious distortion and/or compression might arise. I remember playing the Giya G2s louder and louder and louder and never hearing any strain -- I stopped pushing any louder only because no one in his or her right mind would listen at those levels. Turning it up until I broke something didn’t seem the prudent thing to do.
But the Giya G2 costs $50,000/pair -- $22,000 more than a pair of B1Ds -- and from what I can recall of its sound, it truly betters the B1D only in low-frequency extension and maximum output capability.
Conclusion
When I heard that Laurence Dickie had begun revising Vivid Audio’s Oval B1, I didn’t think he’d be able to make much of an improvement. But the Oval B1 Decade doesn’t sound only a little better than the original model -- it sounds so much better that it now stands alongside Vivid’s very top models, the Giyas, all of which cost much more (and for some rooms, a pair of B1Ds might be the better choice). When I spoke with Dickie after returning the review samples of the Oval B1 Decade, he confessed that even he had been surprised at the magnitude of the improvement. For those who value the sonic qualities of Dickie’s speaker designs, such as unrivaled clarity and openness, the Oval B1 Decade is well worth the not-inconsequential $10,000 increase in price. In short, it’s a complete success."
https://www.soundstagehifi.com/inde...s/947-vivid-audio-oval-b1-decade-loudspeakers
(The highlights above are mine). It's best to read the full review to put everything into proper context. The B1 is discontinued.
"Late to the party but at last intrigued, I reviewed the Oval B1 later that year. When I did, I realized that it had been an oversight on my part not to look at their speakers before -- the Oval B1 wasn’t perfect, but its sensational sound made it my favorite speaker for under $20,000 USD per pair. (The retail price was then $15,000/pair; it’s now $18,000/pair.)......
Description
Laurence Dickie told me that the first choices he made in the redesign of the Oval B1 were of what would remain unchanged: its overall shape of an oval main cabinet permanently affixed to a stand and base, the whole looking vaguely like a tennis racket; and its three-and-a-half-way driver configuration of front-firing tweeter, midrange, and woofer, with a second woofer firing to the rear.
Then came the differences. The B1’s entire cabinet, stand, and base are made of a mineral-filled resin composite; in the B1D, that material is used only for the stand and base. The B1D’s cabinet is made of the same materials as the Giya series: vacuum-infused, fiberglass-reinforced resin sandwiching a balsa core. The resulting light, stiff cabinet has a much higher resonant frequency than the B1’s, meaning that any cabinet resonances are even less likely to be heard when the speaker is reproducing music. According to Dickie, the switch to the newer, far more labor-intensive materials accounts for most of the $10,000 difference in price between the B1 and B1D......
The B1D uses Vivid’s D26 1” (26mm) dome tweeter and D50 2” (50mm) dome midrange driver, both of which are used in the B1 and are here crossed over at the same frequency: 3500Hz. But instead of being left unprotected, as in the B1, each driver has its own permanently affixed grille.......
....The B1D’s two C125 woofers have 5” (125mm) aluminum-alloy cones and include improvements over the woofers used in the B1. (Including the surround, the driver is actually about 6.5” across.) The main difference is that Dickie has moved the magnet from the rear so that the magnet now surrounds the coil.......
..As in the B1, the B1D’s rear woofer operates with full force below 100Hz to supplement the front woofer in the lowest frequencies, but is rolled off above that frequency. The front woofer operates throughout the bass range until it hands off to the midrange at 880Hz. The B1D’s bass extension is specified as 35Hz...
The B1D’s new woofers, and the redesign of the crossover to accommodate them, produced profoundly different results when we had the speaker measured in the anechoic chamber at Canada’s National Research Council. In the charts plotted for the measurements of the original B1, a large cancellation of about 8dB was visible just below 400Hz when the microphone was placed directly in front of the speaker, on the tweeter axis -- the result of the outputs of the front and rear woofers summing out of phase. But that cancellation didn’t carry the entire way around the speaker. When the mike was pointed at the middle of either side of the speaker, from the same distance away as when measured on axis to the tweeter, the woofers’ cancellation was almost completely eliminated...
...Our measurements show that his work was worthwhile; the cancellation on axis is now only about 2dB -- a reduction of 6dB, which is significant...
Sound
....I don’t remember exactly how widely and deeply the B1s presented the soundstages of the recordings I’ve long used as references for that quality, which include Ennio Morricone’s score for the film The Mission (16/44.1 FLAC, Virgin) and the Cowboy Junkies’ The Trinity Session (16/44.1 FLAC, RCA). But I do remember that I was impressed enough that I wrote this about The Mission: “I heard the voices more distinctly through the B1 than through any other speaker I’ve reviewed.” Suffice it to say that all that clarity was still there with the B1Ds, along with a soundstage with the best combination of width, depth, and precise focus of aural images of instruments and voices on that soundstage that I have experienced....
....
The B1’s reproduction of bass is the Achilles’ heel of that otherwise excellent speaker. I found the B1’s upper bass a little too boosted, and the entire lower-to-upper-bass region not quite as tight, detailed, and clear as the frequencies above. That lack of tightness, detail, and clarity created a noticeable lack of integration between the outputs of the front woofer and midrange, and a slight lack of coherence across the audioband -- the quality of output of all the B1’s drivers wasn’t quite identical. If I’d had to assign letter grades, I’d have given the B1’s tweeter and midrange an A, the woofers a B. Those woofers needed to catch up.
They have. As mentioned above, the shape of the ports, the crossover, and the woofers themselves are all different in the Oval B1 Decade. The results: no boost in the upper bass, a little more extension in the lower bass, far more detail from the lowest bass through lower midrange, and an ideal blend of the outputs of all four drivers, from lowest lows to highest highs.....
....the transition from midrange driver to front woofer, and then to the rear woofer’s supplementing of the front, were utterly seamless -- which hadn’t been the case with the B1s.
So, unlike with the B1, I have no caveats about the Oval B1 Decade’s bass -- except that the B1D didn’t have much bass output below about 40Hz. This shouldn’t be surprising from a speaker with just two small woofers in a fairly small cabinet -- the B1D hinted at frequencies in the bottom octave of the audioband that it just couldn’t hit......
(Full-range requires bass extension to 20Hz, the bottom of the audioband, at output levels that match the upper bass, midrange, and above.)
Of course, Vivid’s Giya G2 can also reach lower than the B1D -- down to at least 30Hz, also with tremendous authority. That’s where the B1D mostly fell short of the G2: in the deep bass. And when push comes to shove, I believe the G2 can play a bit louder than the B1D....
...The B1Ds’ sound held together fine under such punishment, but in some extremely loud passages I could sense I shouldn’t push them further -- the subtlest hints of high-frequency compression and hardness were setting in, signs that if I turned them up much louder, serious distortion and/or compression might arise. I remember playing the Giya G2s louder and louder and louder and never hearing any strain -- I stopped pushing any louder only because no one in his or her right mind would listen at those levels. Turning it up until I broke something didn’t seem the prudent thing to do.
But the Giya G2 costs $50,000/pair -- $22,000 more than a pair of B1Ds -- and from what I can recall of its sound, it truly betters the B1D only in low-frequency extension and maximum output capability.
Conclusion
When I heard that Laurence Dickie had begun revising Vivid Audio’s Oval B1, I didn’t think he’d be able to make much of an improvement. But the Oval B1 Decade doesn’t sound only a little better than the original model -- it sounds so much better that it now stands alongside Vivid’s very top models, the Giyas, all of which cost much more (and for some rooms, a pair of B1Ds might be the better choice). When I spoke with Dickie after returning the review samples of the Oval B1 Decade, he confessed that even he had been surprised at the magnitude of the improvement. For those who value the sonic qualities of Dickie’s speaker designs, such as unrivaled clarity and openness, the Oval B1 Decade is well worth the not-inconsequential $10,000 increase in price. In short, it’s a complete success."
https://www.soundstagehifi.com/inde...s/947-vivid-audio-oval-b1-decade-loudspeakers
(The highlights above are mine). It's best to read the full review to put everything into proper context. The B1 is discontinued.
