This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

I adore Thai cuisine. It combines the pungent, sour, sweet, salty and bitter for high contrast. It doesn't overcook its veg to stay crisp. It has mastered the art of sugar not to go cheaply saccharine like so many American deserts but to sneak in tension. Whilst I'm partial also to Indian cuisine, a complex curry is far creamier, denser and thicker. It's unctuous runny lusciousness, not sharply defined resolution of coincident but opposing flavors.

Installing the Three 11R in place of my customary GigaWatt PC3SE Evo on the front-end components Thai'd the overall presentation. Nasal instruments became more nasal, twangy sound twanged harder, reediness grew in reedaciousness, sympathetic metallic buzzing of sarod strings had more buzz. Sorry but language isn't quite as malleable as it could be for max expressiveness in these matters. The many diverging flavors which various instruments create with their peculiar transient flavor—plucked, struck, bowed, blown, forced, tickled, hammered—and their harmonic tone modulations of the core timbre each grew keener. The obvious upshot? The contrast of difference deepened. This added salt, sugar, ginger, kaffir lime leaves, coconut milk, chili peppers, galangal and fish sauce in equal measure. No percentages shifted to move the flavor in a different direction. Everything stayed put as it'd been before. It simply got deeper, clearer and more intense. Like putting more weight on each side of a multi-headed scale without tipping its needle. Spicier. That was it!

Things also got louder. When this occurs and you haven't touched the volume control, you know that the signal voltage didn't magically go up. The only possible explanation is that your scale dropped on the other end. The noise floor lowered. But this we can't hear per se. When your system is fired up but sound is on pause, you should hear nothing. Noise floor as we talk of here is never heard directly. What we do notice is its effect on dynamic range when the difference between loudest and quietest shrinks or expands. Without touching the volume, loudest here didn't get louder. Quiet got quieter. That increased the difference to fool the ear/brain. That's louder we say. Actually, we would probably say that's better. Because as in any A/B that's rigged, even a tiny bit louder sounds better. Always. It's the oldest cheapest trick in the book and here likely was quite tiny. But it was no cheat although still a trick. Filtering AC whilst improving rather than diminishing dynamic reflexes should be the goal of all conditioners but often doesn't happen.

Whether here increased contrast was a function of lower noise and just how those two aspects intertwined is ultimately academic. Having experimented with various isolation transformers in the past (all sold since), I learnt that lower noise needn't equate to a simultaneous increase in spiciness. In fact it seems far more likely to be accompanied by things getting mellower, more chilled and relaxed. If we call that particular mellowing action a noise killer, let's borrow from the word antibiotics. Against life. Antibiotics not only combat infections and inflammations, they also burden our immune system. It effectively slows down. That's the equivalent of suppressing musically relevant energy. Vivaciousness takes a hit. Noise/bacteria are killed just as the doctor ordered. And something else in the process is stifled. That's the print too small to read. But here throwing that small print away made all the difference. The Vibex seemed to lower the noise floor but its suppressant side effects were clearly lower than with the GigaWatt (here I refrain from claiming no side effects at all since we only recognize their deeper absence in the presence of something even better). Clearly though the vitality of my music patient had improved. There was more pep in his step, more zing in my sonic sauce. I'd been thai'd up and loved it. I promptly bought the above Three 11R for my front-end stack.

Here's the thing. What's inside this box which is 'massively' compact given its 11 outlets is precious little to begin with. Of what components there are, most seem indeed dedicated to DC rather than conventional AC filtering. That was news to me. I'd just awoken to the in-yer-face-obvious ills of DC contamination when my buzzing subwoofer transformer repented to dead mute upon plugging into the Two 1R covered in Part I of this review. At the time I'd clearly remained ignorant of what would happen were all components to benefit from a wholesale DC blockade. So here's my question (asked out of idle curiosity since it really matters naught given my satisfaction with the outcome): does the higher count of DC filter parts in this Vibex imply that relative to AC filtration its DC blocking action is dominant and as such a greater contributor to the final result? Given the dearth of commercial DC filters, this would seem mostly unexplored territory ripe for the picking. That's even more relevant when line-level transformers tend to not audibly hum. Who'd think of pursuing DC filtering for them in the first place? As a result just how many serious listeners have experimented with proper DC filtering for their entire system? I reckon few indeed.


Whatever the answer, relative to my prior GigaWatt conditioner sans DC filtering, my ears call Cliff Orman's approach to power filtering clearly more effective. If his Vibex Three 11R were an amp, it'd be a lit-up energizer and accelerator like a Bakoon AMP-11R or Job 225. It would not be an unctuous luscious valve specimen. Very spicy Tom Yum soup, not creamy curry. Given my foodie leanings, that what right up my one-way alley to personal satisfaction.


In closing, no matter which side of the accelerator/damping action you come down on, any serious listener must get down with power delivery, period. Its impact on sonics is significant. Whilst such components (filters, power cords, wall outlets) have zero sex appeal next to the shiny rack components—in fact they tend to hide behind the racks out of sight—they can't be overlooked. Like resonance control power delivery is part of your system's foundation. That means fundamental. Given its efficacy, flawless build and fair price, Vibex's best deserves serious consideration. The Nagra folks clearly knew a thing or four when they adopted Cliff Orman's products for their own reference system and lab gear. I'm glad Matthieu Latour and I had that chat about my buzzing sub. Who knew where that line of inquiry would lead? Synchronicity. Now I also have intuitive appreciation for the name. Vibex. It's not Deadax or Noisenix. It's Vibex. It's about good vibes. Somehow. I'm not clear on how AC filtering, DC blocking and physical vibration attenuation interrelate. Clearly though one Cliff in Spain has staked his claim at exactly their intersection. Spot on I say. X marks that spot. VibeX!
Vibex website