I myself am a Star Sound dealer and should have given a more complete explanation. The Star approach is to have the stand act as a CONDUCTOR for vibrations in order to drain them out of the system as quickly as possible. I find that this works very well. Maple acts as an ISOLATOR to seperate sections of the system from each other and PREVENT vibrations from being transferred. This can also work, I have the aforementioned maple block atop a VPI TNT stand where it works well. What does not work is the mixing of the two approaches as they are using opposing principals in dealing with the same problem.