Footers/Shelf Material

I think Brulee's response to Caterham1 pretty well sums up my experiences messing around with vibration control too. It's fun to try different things though-- just don't know if I've made any progress.

Hi Ken and all. To answer your question Ken, I am trying the various shelves and footers with three different systems and am trying to progress by following the path that sounds good with all three systems. This way, I am hoping I don't go down some blind alleys. Without listing the three systems fully, the sources are (1) Theta Data III and Theta Gen Va; (2) Meridian 500 and Meridian 566-24; and (3) Sonic Frontiers SFCD1. Today I received two pieces of Maple Butchers Block (kindly supplied by Brulee - thanks, I will email you separately Bruce). I was ready for them to sound bad, because I had tried some similar blocks made from local timbers (NZ timbers are unlike much else as our growing conditions are almost unique) and they all sounded "nice" but slow. But I have to say the Maple sounds great - overall better than Corian - the Corian sounding pinched and thickened in the upper treble by comparison. I will need to play around some more, but the Maple definitely has a "sound" and I imagine that used everywhere in a system it may sound too much, and possibly just a tad "slow" - but so far I like what I hear with two shelves in place (out of five shelves in my main system). I am heading towards Neuance shelves under my front end, and Maple under my monoblocks (which are too heavy for the Neuance shelf) - everything sitting on E-A-R feet. Footers are a vexing area. They all seem to be band-aids in one way or another. Most of the "audiophile" footers accentuate the outlines of sound (sounding more exciting or detailed) in some way. But I have eventually settled on the E-A-R feet because they give you the detail without losing any of the body of the sound, and I find they do this over a wide range of components. Garfish - Sonic Frontiers stuff is about the most immune to vibration I have come across - its sound changes the least through tweaking - because they make the boxes right in the first place. Brulee is right that there is a degree to which you can use this stuff to voice a system, but you can also use it to improve a system's transparency. The same is true of all system components. This problem of knowing when we are merely changing the sound rather than improving it is always with us. I look for simple pointers like "naturalness" (where cones and sorbothane fail), "speed" (where sinks fail) and "even-handedness" (where Vibrapods and cones fail).

To add to my previous point - ie. improving versus merely changing the sound. I perceive a problem in this vibration control area in that most of the products on the market are designed to the wrong criteria. Instead of trying to be heard less, they are trying to be heard more. One can understand this because people will want to hear a significant change in the sound when they invest in a footer. But what this leads to is footers that hype some part of the sound. This can obviously lead to the symptoms Garfish and Brulee refer to. Yet products like the E-A-R feet would be hard to sell for $50 each because they do so little to the sound.

Redkiwi, I have been following this thread for a while now and this is a most excellent discussion. So if I understand you correctly you have your front end on EAR feet sitting on top of a Neuance shelf and the monoblocks on butcher block with out the EARs? - Dan

Dan2112 - I am only just getting to grips with the Butchers Block and perceive some small problems, but they are small. I have stated above that the E-A-R feet are great with hard shelves and still hold to that. But I don't call the Butchers Block or MDF hard. With these softer shelves I tend to prefer cones. With softer shelves I also like supporting them with up-turned spikes (like most steel shelves have), but with hard shelves a thin piece of hard synthetic rubber between rack and shelf seems best (Note that Mana racks do not hold to this last rule - always use spikes). So far the Neuance seems to work more like a hard shelf and the Butchers Block more like a soft shelf. So it is E-A-Rs between components and the Neuance and cones between components and the Butchers Block (I think). So far with the Butchers Block the sound is wonderfully open, detailed, extended at the extremes, dynamic and with a realistically large soundstage - but just a tad slow (only very slightly) and there is a very fine grain (that I am working on reducing). Hope this clarifies. I have ordered more Neuance shelves and will probably only really know how good they are when I have more than just the one - but it is very very fast, with no significant resonant peaks.