Vibe BlackBox Bass 5

Shiny piano-black bass amp in the BlackBox series. Supplied with a goodly selection of accessories, the best one is the sticky-backed amp joining piece. You use this plate to connect a BlackBox amp to another of the same ilk. In this case you could use a pair of BlackBox 5s as the product may be used ‘strapped’ so as to supply one speaker lead with the energy of two amplifiers. Or you could connect it to a four or two channel amplifier. Either way you will get the appearance of one seamless and very major-looking amp. Not designed to be compact but rather to adhere to a level of design brief. Four layer circuit boards are used. The ‘class’ of the amp is ‘GH’. This is an advanced tech and is used in recording studio amplifiers. It’s all about how the amplifier makes watts for the outputs from the electricity it is given. The best sounding has been thought to be class A. This is when the amp draws full power all the time from the power supply. In car amps it’ll cripple your batteries; in a home amp it’ll put your electricity bill through the roof. Class AB is a bit of the best ‘A’ method but tempered with use of a power supply section that can generate the watts on demand and very fast so as to use the electricity the better. It is sweet sounding but turns a lot of the energy to heat rather than output watts and is thus quite inefficient. Class D is an order of magnitude more efficient so you can make more bass with whatever headroom of amperes your car’s charging system has, but has often been a low quality sound. Vibe care about bass sound quality as well as midrange and so have used the Class GH hybrid system, which is a chunk cleverer than class D. It uses a dual power supplied AB section one PSU for normal use and one for big peaks, coupled with an overlay that tracks the juice needed by the audio signal input. It sounds techy ‘cos it is but all you need know is that you get some of the Class D efficiency with class AB sweetness. But does it work? Let’s go see.
– Class GH Hybrid DSP chip controlled – 1 x 750w RMS @ 4 Ohms- 1 x 1,500w RMS @ 2 Ohms- 1 x 1,350w RMS @ 1 Ohm – Aluminium heatsink with Piano Black finish
– Internally fan cooled (fan switched in real time by load)
– Power Terminals with Allen headed grub screw connection made to fit Vibe 4 Gauge cable
– Subsonic filter settable between 10Hz and 80Hz
– Zero to 180 degrees phase flip switch- Low Pass Filter 30Hz to 250Hz, 24dB per Octave – Parametric Bass Boost settable up to +15dB from 30Hz to 125Hz (one control each for frequency and amount)
– Remote gain BBR1 bass control knob plus cable included for use with control port socket
– High level input (0.4V to 12V) via supplied plug-loom and RCA stereo input (0.2V to 5.5V) as well as slave RCAs for strapping
– Removable end caps with illuminated BlackBox logo on one
– Mono or Strapped operation
– Frequency response 10Hz to 250Hz
– Signal to Noise Ratio 94dB
– Fuse Rating 30A x4
– HxWxD(mm) 57 x 580 x 224m
– C/W Polishing cloth, fabric bag, end caps, amp connection piece with self adhesive pad, fixings, spare fuses and Allen keys, stickers and manual
Review by Adam Rayner
It is lovely to open up a new purchase, especially when it’s something serious like this amplifier. It comes with a load of pomp and circumstance. For one, the thing is packed with what can only be described as love. The packing is cut polyurethane, which only classy kit comes in. You remove a couple of top bits and reveal your amplifier in its cloth baggie. So shiny is it that the urge to keep it clean is satisfied by supply of a small polishing cloth with branding upon it as an accessory. BlackBox Bass 5 was hooked up to the Odyssey PC9125 battery via the StreetWires cable loom and monitored with a multimeter while it was hooked up to a rapid marine grade battery charger from Merlin Equipment. It looks pretty with the end caps on as the wires are hidden and the bit of plastic that sticks out of the end reveals itself to be a clever prism that bends the internal LED’s light up and out via the BlackBox logo piece inset within the end cap. Thus a removable piece is lit as brightly as if it were wired to it. The look is a total convincer that the whole thing is full of components and makes the amp look all the more impressive for what it implies as well as what it actually does. Dead clever and looks gorgeous. Anyone who denies that pretty lights on their amp are nice to have as part of the package is a fibber.
A ‘known good’ headunit was used to supply signal to the amplifier and also sent its headunit power to a pair of 6×9 ovals for monitoring purposes. A stout MDF sealed box was used to house a Hertz subwoofer. (reviewed here ) It is like Boomzilla’s kid’s fist. Small, almost as deep as it is wide at ten inches and of huge density.
The subwoofer got a good review as it took all the power the amp could throw it at and played with great beauty and aplomb. Which of course reflects very well on the amplifier as it was called on to play complex bass lines from the dB Drag test CD. I didn’t go so far as to play PSU sucking and subwoofer hurting pure bass tones as neither amp nor woofer are out and out SPL items, (although that said, I reckon the Black Death weapons-grade woofers that Vibe do will be being used on strapped braces of these amplifiers, so I could be plain wrong there.) and in any case I wanted to hear music.
Even when running hard already, there was headroom. I didn’t really stretch the amplifier’s ability to make watts as it simply doubles it guts into a two ohm load. But as the woofer was rated 450w RMS, 900w peak and the amp is good for 1,500 watts of peak (double the RMS for a sensible number) at the four Ohm load used, I was kind of glad that I hadn’t the dual voice coil version, as I know I would have been tempted to show the rig two, not eight Ohms and would have had a fat kilowatt and a half, (three thousand watts peak) flowing through the speaker wires.
The fan inside is like a motorcycle engine but much quieter. It revs up and stops and starts again, entirely dependent upon the level and weight of the signal it is playing. My use was all start stop and mad bass tracks and I heard the fan do all sorts of things. At first, I wasn’t sure what was going on as I was hard pressed to hear the fan and yet I was all but at ear level with it. The spin rate rises and falls with overall bass energy under the control of a DSP chip. Dead clever and it almost seemed to anticipate the need for cooling. This will keep these amps working well for ever I reckon as a cool amp lives longer and these are predictive rather than reactive. (And I arrogantly challenge any other reviewer to spot THAT!) Anyway, you will never hear the fan, unless you mount it upside down in your roof above your head.
The controls and features are as good as any user could wish for. You don’t like subsonic filters, or you want a savage one? Both situations are possible with one knob as the always-on subsonic can be cranked right back to 10Hz. Any less is for coil-burning and no sound. The Bass Boost is parametric, too, so you can dial up an amount and set the frequency separately. Best of all, this goes down to a nutty 30Hz. A full 15dB extra at 30Hz is for calling pachyderms for hot loving by bull elephants. Furthermore, the main low pass bass crossover is a serious 24dB per Octave design and really slices the highs out well. You can go in on speaker or signal level and there are extra RCA sockets that come into play when you strap two together.
As yet TA are not fully armed to do power tests on amps but looking at how the 450w RMS, 900w peak Hertz subwoofer was coping and then just briefly beginning to unload at the top level of lunacy, I reckon the 750w RMS quoted at four Ohms is exactly what we were getting and that the Hertz woofer is a speaker of truth, too. However, I feel I would have been more able to impress had I run it at two Ohms.
Of course it can get a little impractical to do this but I feel that the most crucial thing has always got to be the sound quality. Bass is all very well but a really good woofer wants a signal that can do swift stops and starts as well as be hugely potent and this amplifier can do that with ease.
It looks sexy, it tracks a bass line very well and is melodic and has the grip of a gnarly fist in a velvet glove. And you can quote me on that. (They probably will.)
The only small down check for me is that I reckon future models would benefit with a slight upgrade to the power terminals. They are made to fit the Vibe four gauge cable but look narrow, measuring an actual 8.59mm internal diameter on the digital calipers. There is no stepped space within the insulation block to encompass a short length of the cable’s own insulation sheath, so as to avoid bare conductor showing at the terminal, like a thigh out of a stocking, when under any bending stress in an install. I know the end cap covers this area but right now you could end up seeing bare conductor, even given that the terminal blocks are nicely angled out from the panel to help avoid this. I’d like to see mighty 1 gauge terminals under that lovely end cowl. (But that’d be a bit much perhaps…) And of course, it’s unavoidable to put the max power on a heatsink decal, it’s just that one woofer of normal type will get 750 watts, only a two ohm load on peak will see the three thousand it says on the box.
It’s still loud enough to earn you an ASBO with injudicious use and scores well enough to earn a Talk Audio Recommended flag, due in no small part to all the clever bits and bobs and features score.
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 9
Power Output 8
Features 10
Build Quality 9
Value For Money 8