Vibe Lite Air 6 Component Speakers

Described as their Supercar series, these speakers are aimed at those who want all the performance but less of the added mass a couple of pairs of chunky speakers can add. With magnets less than a tenth the weight of those put on the Black Air 5 reviewed at roughly the same time, these are seen in the Vibe demo Porsche. Engineered with the designer’s love of cut alloy and thus very smart and ‘feature’ these are not really meant to hide under stock grilles.
The grilles they come with are metal rather than plastic and the terminals are screw-down bits of engineering rather than a set of cheapie stamped plated lugs. The cones are Kevlar and they are fitted to a Polyurethane surround at their outer edges and have a yoke of  a super light ring of holey plastic that looks like it serves to add rigidity, at their centres. This is necessary due to the large 35mm voice coil you can see around the outside of the plug of N36 grade Neodymium sticking clean through it. This is the ‘rare earth’ magnet material that is ten times the strength or thereabouts, of ‘normal’ Ferrite efforts. (The sort you see rated by the hundreds of ounces on big classic subwoofers.) The chassis are sharp and smart looking castings with a grey fine grit finish and also have the same cut surfaces as the superb front grille retainer ring/gaskets. You get a sticky backed ring of foam gasket as well as a window sticker and manual/warranty card pack.
They weigh very little in the hand until they have the grille and cast front ring in place but their mounting depth is very shallow. The 20mm silk tweeters are finished in the same house flavour and have neatly terminated wires affixed. You get all the usual tweeter mount options via  kit of mounting parts. The passives are stripped-down (three components) and the drivers designed to cope with natural roll-off with low crossover slope, so are not heavy either but light weight boxes ready-wired into their looms.
– 20mm Silk Dome tweeter
– Cast Aluminium Chassis
– Aluminium front gasket ring to midbass driver
– Polyurethane surround
– Kevlar cone
– RMS Power handling: 100w
– Peak Power handling: 300w
– Minimum input: 50w RMS
– Sensitivity: 84dB
– Frequency Response: 55Hz to 25kHz
– Mounting Depth: 45mm
– Mounting Diameter: 143mm
– Voice Coil Diameter: 25mm
– Magnet Material: Neodymium
– Magnet Weight: 0.6Oz
– Magnet Rating: N36
– Window sticker, fixings, gasketing and cut out template included
Review by Adam Rayner
The passives and this system are interesting. Far bigger than you could ever hide under a coax, there is a properly fat inductor coil with a ferrite core in each box to do a six decibel filter for the bass and a small oi-you-less-of-it-pip component and a capacitor in the positive speaker line of the tweeter, giving an over-power protected 6dB per Octave in the other direction. The little brown pip is a clever stroke and means that although stripped down, Vibe knew not to remove this bit! It’s a heat-related power cut-off switch. If it gets too much wellie for its rated oomph it’ll just go open circuit until things cool down and will have saved a million tweeters from death since they invented the device. I have seen this done with tiny light bulbs in line with tweeter feeds in MB Quart speakers’ passives but this unassuming little Lentil is a master stroke!
Also, anyone who cares about cut Aluminium and Kevlar and the dashboards of posh Audis will appreciate the unashamed looks and presentation of the product.
It comes dripping with the Joy of Possession thing, with every part ascribed a cute icon by the in house designer and explained in a few words. Just like the big Japanese companies do. I was impressed by the build quality and all the stuff that adds up to the Vibe speaker buying experience and can easily see that supercar owners would happily understand that this, while not being mad price, is commensurate technology for their faster and lighter than average ride.
As before, I found the speakers to have a superbly high power handling and also to dislike being played at low levels. When only tickled, only part of what they can do comes through. I played more stuff from the Focal Spirit of Sound #6 disc, with bits of guitar based blues, South African choirs doing their thing and even the weird digital rendition of Satisfaction.
Definition and image placement were excellent and the instruments all came through as separate entities until it got driven a bit too hard, at which point it doesn�t all go ugly but rather simply moves gently into clipped even if you give it hooliganism. This may be to do with the softly overlapping mere six decibel slopes on the simple one-component each way crossovers (plus the HF safety switcher). I was well impressed by the weight of the low end of the system, even given that at least an eight inch woofer would be likely to be accompanying these speakers in most installs.
You could easily have these as your only speakers and find they cut through wind noise at speed and fill your cockpit with music. They are not mad end HiFi and the price reflects this but they are potent, incredibly good looking and well engineered and as such will withstand enthusiastic use for years on end.
The use of Neodymium works a treat and there is no issue at all with them giving flimsy light weight sound since they rock! The skinny profile has not sacrificed sound quality of power and they easily handled the full output of the Lite Box Stereo 4 amplifier run bridged at around a quarter kilowatt per channel. This means the efficiency cannot be high but as Vibe amps are so powerful, that isn’t an issue either.
A seriously well aimed product that anyone with a car that has light weight materials in its construction needs to know about.
Sound Quality 8.0
Build Quality 9.0
Power Handling 9.0
Efficiency 7.0
Value For Money 8.0
Overall rating 8.2