Vibe Minis In Vegas

I wanted to use a lyric from the song in the iconic movie The Italian Job as a headline but then this wouldn’t get found in searches so easily! The best one might have been ‘the most famous line in all cinema’ at least for us Brits – which is “You were only meant to blow the bloody DOORS off!” said by Michael Caine in the same film.
All of which could create moans from the purists as the new Mini is said by some to be more German than British. But piffle to that, for the Mini is still an absolute cutie pie British icon as far as Americans (and me) are concerned and are a great set of new cars to boot. (Cooper Works, please) And the whole hard-rocking and slightly decadent image of the British has been sold upon a treat for the new dudes distributing the kit in the USA, a division of Metra called Vibe USA.
Now every really horribly degenerate villain in any Hollywood movie forever has been a role for an English actor. Our rock stars are the most serious. We gave the States The Stones and Ozzie and even Billy Idol. (The last of which they can happily keep) We are now giving them an horrendous wake up call and three of the spunkiest new demo cars ever to hit the freeway.
Talk Audio was there at the CES in ‘Vegas to see their launch and we now bring you the Red and the White and the Blue…..the Vibe Minis.
 
The amazing thing about these cars was the collaborative effort of the experts involved and how well it all dovetailed at transatlantic-plus-transcontinental distances to end up all being exhibited in Las Vegas, Nevada in double quick time. On the glamorous midlands end, engineer and acoustic alchemist type Rob Gurney designed the systems with cunning for Rich Laker to build. A rented UK Mini was used as template, taken all apart, designed, built, test fitted and put back together again! Rob and Rich created Ikea-esque ‘flat-pack’ enclosures and amp racks to send to the USA and there, the Metra-owned Installer Institute guys reassembled the enclosures and racks in the back of each car and were allowed to stamp their own bit of identity upon the cars by doing the door installations as they felt moved to. The result is three cars with ‘the same’ install in each but with distinctly different identities.
The red one is BlackAir kit, the white one is crammed with Space equipment and the blue one is a bustin’ Slick installation. I’ll take you through them…..

RED – BLACKAIR
Named Drivers: King Arthur, James Bond, Sherlock Holmes
The system is headed up by a USA part numbered (of course) Pioneer deck, the DEH-P3001B. Each door has six coils running in each. A set of BlackAir six inch components has their six inch midbass driver mounted at the back of the door with its tweeter at the front. In between sit a six inch coaxial driver set and then a five inch coaxial driver array, adding up to three mids and three tweeters per side.
Directly behind the occupants in a wall of bass hell are two sodding great BlackAir yellow coned fifteen inch wide woofers housed in bastard great huge ported enclosures. That man Gurney is a nutter! Who needs to see out the back, when you are nipping through gaps in between fat arsed American cars in your spunky red Mini, exhibiting the cheek of Old Nick – who will of course be being played by a British actor.
Out back the rack houses a Vibe Delta Box, which is a bit of a weapon. This line driver takes the signal from the Pioneer and thrusts some Civet-kaka-grade coffee right up the inputs of the brace of ST4 amplifiers and the BlackBox Bass5 amplifier. A bigger signal for better signal to noise ratio, fatter dynamics and well, more of why you wanted a wall of fifteens in the first place and three times the normal amount of music in the front! Just to keep show goers happy and to make a bit more level when exhibiting, there was a set of SEK-69 ovals mounted in the boot area to create some full range tunes for the public. By the time you read this, these will have been changed for BlackAir ovals – I gather this was just about the only supply issue they had under the utterly berserk time-line these cars were created under.

WHITE – SPACE
Named Drivers: David Beckham, Harry Potter, William Shakespeare
This car is my personal favourite mostly because I am a fan of the bad assed Space speaker technology. I can afford to be picky as a reviewer but it’s like working a deli – I only ended up nicking the honey roast ham. If I was doing the shopping, I’d be well chuffed at being able to build something serious for whatever my desire led me to – for the money. But if you are a Vibe head, this is the line you end up at. (Unless of course Weapons-Grade lunacy is your thing and that’s pronounced BlackDeath. Again headed up by the Pioneer DEH-P3001B headunit, the doors in the Dave, Harry, Bill car have two sixes and a five again on the midbass front but all three tweeters are the Space component jobs so the HF really cuts through, especially as they are all clustered at the front of the door builds so as to offer a collaborative effort of ‘throw’. Open the doors of this one and you will hear it for bloody miles.
The Gurney-designed bass enclosures are all identical from car to car, as they are tuned to 35Hz and hold a common volume of a whacking twelve cubic feet, of which 2.08cu. ft. is the venting, (big enough to run a Space twelve on its own!) All of which is well within the usable passband of all the woofers and allows a direct comparison of the different series of speakers’ sonic characteristics. “I don’t know anyone who’s walled three Minis!” to quote Mr. Gurney.
A set of QB69s play rear-viewer tunes and a Delta Box again roars the news to the amp rack. This houses two Stereo4 amps and two Bass5 amps, making a goodly few more watts than the BlackAir car. The whole look is sexy and purposeful and the way the Installer Institute guys made the pretty front doors with the passive crossover on display as well, have done the car proud.

BLUE – SLICK
Named Drivers: Robin Hood, Ozzie Osbourne, Winston Churchill
In many ways, this is the most straightforward of the three installs. Every bit as gorgeously executed as the other two, it does have a bit less going on door build wise as they wear three sets of coaxials each, so no passives nor clustered tweeters to put on show. A Slick 60 sits next to another Slick 60 in the door, with a Slick 50 coax in the front of them both, so again it’s six voice coils, but this time from the more affordable Slick line. By no means ‘entry level’ as the company has Fli and also Edge brands of ice to offer at lower price points, this car may well represent the nuttiest Value For Money of the three of them and again, shows that a tight install with lower priced kit can still get you a nipple-stiffening experience.
The Slick fifteens are a lovely proof of the speaker manufacturer’s hairy testes just evidenced by their very existence. Most lower priced woofer lines do tens AND twelves. (Country AND Western) Vibe make some specialist-as-anything eights and they love their fifteens. These look the nuts with their purposeful simple concave dishes rather than cones and their reverse suspensions at the top.
Driven by two a7 amplifiers and a3 and an a4 for bass, there’s a set of oval Slick 69.3 rear-punter entertainment duties in this one.

They sat pointing outwards pugnaciously on the Vibe stand at the CES, near the new outrageous ‘coffin’ demo for the BlackDeath woofer, all looking out like they were parked on the roof of FIAT in the original Italian Job film. I gather that after we had seen them in the hall that Max Power took them out on the day after the show to snap them creating a roadblock on the Strip.
It was a brilliant experience and Talk Audio wants to offer up a very real thank you to Vibe for helping this journalist to get to Las Vegas to report on what was a tough year for most to even be able to get there. That Vibe are invading the States with such vigour in such times is a roaring success story & I reckon deserves one of those export Queens Awards to Industry thingies.
But then I do love my mobile electronics. It’s just utterly lovely to find a British company who share the love so madly and are so damn good at it. Who would EVER have thought that way back in 1993 when the company first started out that little old Vibe could ‘break’ the USA.
They’ve blown the bloody doors off all right.
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