Vibe BlackBox Stereo 2

Two channel amplifier with trimode capabilities. Class AB, it has a single pair of quality RCA input sockets and a speaker level input. Switchable three-level input sensitivity, high and lowpass crossovers with a frequency multiplier switch to increase range of adjustment. Steep 24dB per octave slopes and a 45Hz bass boost of up to 15dB. Very high sonic specifications, very high quality of finish. End caps cover connections and have illumination window for large and powerful blue LED illumination ‘on’ indicator block. Complete with manual, end caps, joining piece for connecting two BlackBox amps as one and window sticker. Packed in a black cloth string-closure bag to protect the finish.
– Class AB
– 2 x 110w RMS @ 4 Ohms
– 2 x 175w RMS @ 2 Ohms
– 1 x 350w RMS @ 4 Ohms bridged
– Aluminium heatsink with Piano Black finish
– 8Ga. Power Terminals with Allen headed grub screw bare wire socket connection
– 24dB per Octave high/low pass crossovers with 10x frequency multiplier
– 0 to 15dB Bass Boost @ 45Hz
– Adjustable input sensitivity in three stages: 0.2V to 0.6V; 0.6V to 2.0V; 2V to 8V
– End caps with illuminated BlackBox logo included
– Stereo, Mono & Trimode operation
– Frequency response 10Hz to 50kHz
– Signal to Noise Ratio 114dB
– Channel separation 70dB
– High Pass Filter 55Hz to 3.5kHz
– Low Pass Filter 55Hz to 3.5kHz
– Fuse Rating 30A x1
– HxWxD(mm) 57 x 357 x 224mm
Review by Adam Rayner
The world seems to have gone a bit mad. For the price of some cheap and cheerful watts, the sort you can buy in a great long extruded bucket for shaking the windows at McDonalds, you can get ones with some proper quality. I’m talking about the ordure sandwich that is what the term ‘Signal to Noise Ratio’ is all about. Based on an old joke about how is life like a poo sandwich? The more bread you have, the less you notice the Well, the higher the sound level of the lovely clean audio versus the Noise Floor, or inherent hissy stuff that exists in all electronics, no matter how posh, then the better and clearer your sound quality generally is. Of course tweaks will then go into one about electronics components and who makes the best. But the thing is, a low S/N/R (let’s abbreviate signal to noise ratio) sounds horrid and hissy and a massive high one sounds light, airy and natural. It works for most things, say CD or DVD mechanisms’ sound output. In this case it’s an amplifier.
I can tell you that greater than one hundred decibels or >100dB, is a generally good score for an amplifier. (Decibel is a word not just used for sound, it is used to describe a logarithmic ratio between your reference point and the spec quoted, be it channel separation or whatever. It’s about relative levels. Sound and how we hear it is logarithmic in its maths, too, which is why for loudness we qualify it as decibels sound pressure level or dB SPL.) Thing is, the S/N/R of this puppy is a whopping 114dB. This puts it into audiophile territory.
That said, you really do get more when you buy a many-thousand-pound transistor amplifier from the likes of home brands such as Mark Levinson or Krell. You also have to be paying for more than the bling for the £15k hand built nutty-end Genesis or several grand’s’ worth of Diamond Audio’s top end and this thing costs £200. Thus the insides have been built to a cost, with a touch of the old Sir Alec. The bloke (Isignionis) who designed the first Mini. His genius was to make the car as good as it was for the price.
This is no Mini, as apart from anything else, it comes with high end features like proper weighty end caps and even a joining piece so you can make two of these amps it has a sister with four channels into one great big monster slab to impress your chums or just please yourself.
I liked the wide range of controls, with particular reference to both high level input for speaker wire possibilities from a stock system that you cannot change, to a wickedly wide range of input sensitivities for the RCA inputs. Switchable from very low old fashioned two hundred millivolts up to a state of the art eight Volts solid. This means that either a quiet wee 200mV line out would be fine or else you can thrust a line driver’s output right up its thing.
The end caps are a bit special. Both made from heavy gauge aluminium, with ground edges and the Black Box logo in lower case in a decal or the Vibe logo on the other end. That one has an inset window which is lit from within once in place on the wire connections end. There is a corresponding slab of clear plastic with blue LEDs inside it sticking out of the amp that light up brighter than just about any on-lamp I have ever seen. It’s eerie blue install lighting-up stuff. The look is very sexy and tech.
I applied it to various CDs and DVDs from the RCA output of a high end Clarion deck and fed the output into the wonderfully power capacious JBL T696 Special Edition 6x9s in two plywood boxes. They really moved some air and I was able to review the speakers a treat as I was pretty more than certain that the amplifier wasn’t adding or subtracting anything. Except when I slammed some bass onto some tunes I played from Bass Mekanik to make up for the 6x9s not actually being woofers. (Poor loves, they coped, although I hit them with this Black Box rather hard.) Being able to accept such a wide range of signal levels means that if you are an idiot, you can overdrive this amp and make it distort. It didn’t go into protection, though and waited until I had stopped being a bit of a bottom and then carried on happily after that.
That I was even thinking about comparing it to the really pricey things says more about how much more you would have to spend on some other things to get the level of poke and quality for the money that this offers, rather than it being an exotic product. You can sense good design and conception and this definitely has a slice of that. A versatile building block amp that can be used with confidence.
Overall 8.8
Sound Quality 8
Power Output 8
Features 9
Build Quality 10
Value For Money 9