Now that my Sf Cremona Auditor Ms have gone (to a very good home), I’m looking to replace them. The new speakers will be standmounts or smallish floorstanders, and they’ll have to be SAM ready. They’ll be driven by the D200 in my second system in my study, which is 5 x 4m.
Today I paid a visit to Cornflake in London’s Fitzrovia. Back in the day Cornflake was a hi-fi dealer in a small shop in Covent Garden. Now they've expanded, and their business is hi-fi, AV and (above all) home installations. That’s where the money is in London. Their showroom is a wonder of modern tech, but hi-fi is still the beating heart of what they do: the place is packed with McIntosh, Bryston, PMC, Vivid, Martin Logan etc.
What drew me to Cornflake was an ex-demo pair of Vivid V1.5s. They also had a beautiful ex-demo pair of PMC Fact 8s in tiger ebony. I took my D200 along and listened to both speakers, with the requisite SAM config files, of course.
The Vivids and PMCs are very different speakers, and TBH I was more interested in the Vivids than the PMCs, but I do believe that it makes sense to have a comparison, a reference point. How would the Vivids compare with the PMCs?
I’d heard both speakers before, back in August 2013. I was hugely impressed by the Vivids at a demo at Audiolounge. I heard the PMCs at Audio Venue two days later, alongside the Proac D30Rs and B&W 804 Diamonds. I wasn’t persuaded by the PMCs back then; I preferred the Proacs.
Enough intro already! Let’s get down to business.
The Vivids are really remarkable speakers. They sound exceptionally clean. The top end is very spacious and airy. Female voices, violins etc are wonderfully clean and true. My reference point is my Martin Logan Montis. The Vivids can’t manage the kind of presence and holographic sound of the MLs, but they do get surprisingly close. Along with the clean and pure top end, they image superbly.
Their other trick is speed. Again, they’re never going to be as fast as ESLs, but they come a very close second. The speed is there from the top end right down to the bass. They bounce and jive.
I was very happy with their presentation of all genres of music: solo piano, baroque strings, big symphonic stuff, soul and (for good measure) my reference Yello disk (The Eye).
Moving on to the PMCs was disappointing. The one area where the PMCs were superior was scale. They do a better rendition of large-scale symphonic music. Better in terms of the size of the soundstage at least. And they do go a little deeper, though not much.
But where the Vivids were beautifully clean and accurate, the PMCs seemed to me ragged and thrashy. The top end wasn’t persuasive at all. I felt that some high frequencies were being shoved down my throat in a fairly unpleasant way. They were brighter than the Vivids, but brighter in a distorted way. It was clear to me (and this is of course just me) that the PMCs flattered to deceive.
I found the comparison quite shockingly one-sided. One speaker presented a clear and articulated window into the music; the other threw some rather messy and fussy stuff at me. The Vivids get fairly close to the presentation of ESLs. Maybe it’s that weird globular cabinet design that cancels out resonances. (You can kind of see why Vivids are so expensive: a lot of work has gone into producing a structure that produces a neutral and natural sound.) The PMCs on the other hand are boxes, despite their slim and elegant form, and compared to the Vivids they sounded messy to me.
Needless to say all of the above is my subjective response. Also needless to say it’s my money. And I know where it would go.
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