Isolation Cones. Will I get the point?

Cones & other tweaks are system dependent; what works well for one won't necessarily help the next guy at all, or it might work even better. Experimentation is required, along with a system that's revealing & resolving enough to show you the differences. My own experiences with cones had the most pronounced effect on source components; CD player & turntable (preamp & tuner to a lesser extent). Not much of a change was noted when I tried them with one power amp, although other tweaks such as shelving & footers had a greater effect there.
Different types of cones work differently on different components too. I keep an assortment on hand: Black Diamond (carbon fiber #3's & #4's) BBC & Audio Points (plated & plain brass), Polycrystal, aluminum, steel, & Orchard Bay titanium.
Cones are coupling devices which help to sink the vibrations out from your equipment, clarifying & improving the sound. When used with speakers they also improve mechanical stability of the cabinets, realizing a more focused effect.
My best results are had with cones when used in conjunction with other techniques, rather than standalone. I use Vibrapods to isolate Black Diamond shelving from my rack's vibrations, then cones to couple the stray vibrational energy out of the component & into the isolated dead-mass shelves. So the sandwich looks like this: component, cones (with discs underneath for the sharp pointy ones), Black Diamond shelf, Vibrapods, then the rack shelf is underneath all that.
You can even tune the effect by placing coins under the cones points; pennies, nickels, dimes, etc. all sound different. Another tuning technique is to vary the spacing of the three cones under the component; closer together is generally warmer & less resolving, further apart is brighter & more revealing.
Mass loading techniques, inner tubes etc. these are other tuning techniques that are sometimes used to good effect (or not) but I don't want to overwhelm you right off the bat.

Bob- Have you ever thought of taking your traveling circus on the road? open up "Bundus system tuning" bring your bag of tricks and tune folks systems and then take all of there bloody money! This may work we should work out the details and get this thing rolling.

I have experienced good things with cones under my speakers, I was running them for the first few years with out and realized I should try them and WOW! A more seamless soundstage-that is to say it sounds like wall of sound and not like a left channel, a right channel and everything else coming from the non-existant center channel. I also noticed a lot more bass and it seemed smoother then before. But as Bob said it is very system dependent-though I think he may be off the deep end with the pennies and nickels thing, the cheapskate should use silver dollars like the rest of us ;)

~Tim

Hi Tim: If you think that this is bad just give Mike VansEvers a call. He'll have you playing with blocks all over again; wood blocks of different sizes & types of wood, located in different places throughout the listening room & even placed atop of & alongside of your components. The scary part is that this stuff actually works!

Whirshfield, I think the relevant point here is the difference between the way cones or spikes function underneath a speaker vs. the other components you are wondering about. The reason Thiels (I own 'em too) come with spike points is to rigidly couple the speaker cabinet to the floor, assuming the floor is not a flexible suspended job and is carpeted (if the floor is too flexible or resonant, degradation instead of benefit may result from direct coupling; without carpet, protective disks may need be used in between for floor protection). The spikes do this by piercing the carpet to the floor below, bringing the speaker's considerable weight to bear on three tiny points (which define a plane) at some extremely high PSI (pounds per square inch). This has the effect of rigidly fixing the cabinet in position without the possibility of sonically significant wobble or flex (particularly in the case of a poured concrete floor substrate, like the foundation of a typical SFH). This in turn gives the drivers, especially the high-excursion bass driver, a less "lossy" "launch platform" from which to operate. In other words, the mechanical impulses as transduced by the moving drivers are not partially dissapated on unwanted cabinet motion ("For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" - or how about, "If you see the cabinet rocking, don't come a-knocking!"). This makes the speaker's response more accurate and linear, both temporally and dynamically. This type of operation DOES NOT have anything to do with theories about "vibrational drainage" or "resonant tuning" and the like that you see bandied about when it comes to cones being placed under electronic equipment. For that type of useage, you may subscribe to any of the above-posted or similar theories; I take them all with a grain of salt (especially those pertaining to the "mechanical diode" concept of supposed one-way motional transference - the famous "drainage with isolation"). I personally believe that environmental isolation, in the form of non-resonant decoupling support footers, makes the most sense under most components (I like Audio Prism Iso-Bearings here). This should be combined with a highly rigid and inert support shelf and rack, for which good arguments can be made in favor of construction that is either very massive (hard to excite, vibrationally speaking) or very light (quick to stop vibrating, less inertial influence over the component). Good arguments can also be made for suspended (hanging) support systems, to in effect remove the components from sharing the floor with the speakers. The "soft" footer support concept is essentially one of a damped spring, and just as a car suspension is tuned to the mass of the vehicle, a component that very heavy may need several footers underneath to place each footer in its optimum range of compression vs. compliance, while a lightweight component may need to be mass-loaded on top of the cabinet. (Speaking of cabinet tops, many of them will benefit from the internal application of a constrained-layer damping adhesive sheeting material to kill ringing of the casework). Of course, in the final analysis, if you're gonna tweak, then you're gonna have to try different things out and listen for yourself. It's all quite dependent on the component in question, but as for myself, in general I think the improvements to be had from aftermarket footers are fairly marginal in most situations with a good rack system, but not entirely insignificant either. For my all-tube amps, Iso-Bearings result in a little bit more transparency in the bass, and they help keep my API PLC from disturbing the rest of my rack. But I also had a CD player that was more likely to skip when disturbed if on FocalPods, so cones may have helped there. And I have never tried air bladders, microscope tables, ball-and-cup systems, etc., although I do have a Symposium shelf under my TT, which I like. As always, YMMV!

this is the funniest string I have read here at Audiogon (aside from the cat sleeping on amps)...it seems I shouldn't spend my money the way I want to, and what works for one may not work for another...yet that means the tweak is useless?

Back to answering the orginal question...try points, and see what you hear. You may or may not get the point.

I do have one question...if van evers sells wood blocks to tweak my sound, will he also sell me the pennies dimes and nickels to tweak? If so, I wonder how much he charges.