WHAT HAS WORKED FOR YOU? ISOLATION PLATFORMS, FOOTERS, ETC. for a DAC?

Well, the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platform arrived yesterday, and with the limited time I had, I simply put it under the turntable and spun a record. Keep in mind that the Rega Planar 3 was sitting on 4 Stillpoints Ultra Mini Risers, which lifted the performance of the Rega to what I would consider a "good" level, without comparisons to my Nottingham or my memories of my Versa Dynamics (still out on the West Coast).
My reaction was of the "...yeah, it sounds...nice..." but nothing more than that. In other words, I wasn’t jumping up and down with joy the moment I pulled the system out of mute. And that, in itself, was disappointing. Fortunately, I’m a mad scientist, so I simply thought, this is going to take time. It’s not like the first time I heard my Antique Sound Lab Hurricanes and was speechless (and you can see by the length of my posts that speechless is not one of my more prominent characteristics). Yeah, I hear you laughing out there.

When I returned home last night, I was not up to fooling around with the feet, so I waited until today. I balanced the turntable (using a bubble level that measures front to back and side to side) and played music. First up was an old album by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross. The sound was superior to the Stillpoints - but not by much. Then I decided to rotate the front and rear feet on the right hand side. Being the "mad scientist" type, I will rotate a footer so little that, were you watching me, you might say, "You didn’t even move it." And you’d be right. But tiny, TINY movements tell me more than turning a quarter of a turn, or even 1/16" turn.
With one tiny turn (remember, almost invisible to my own eye) on the front right foot, there was a clear improvement in each singer’s voice, but especially Annie Ross’ voice. Also, CLEARLY more audible: the breaths singers take in between measures/notes. That low-level detailing is part of what contributes to the sense of continuousness, the one component that did this better than anything I’ve heard being the Jadis Defy 7. Nothing before - or since - has matched those components for continuousness, although I imagine if I had a very, VERY expensive system, I might hear that. My old 1990 system which I’ve outlined in other posts, would be, in today’s dollars, around $90k, although a $90k system now would, I imagine, surpass my then $50k system in the HEAR and now (that was not a typo).

So, the voice was more continuous, having lost the stop-start nature (where the singer stops singing and seems to disappear until they start singing again) that less accomplished systems convey. Which, in turn, contributes to a more "alive" sound, the way my tuner sounds when I listen to the Metropolitan Opera performances on Saturday afternoons (and those performances, by the way, sound quite "real". If you can’t afford the best equipment (and who can??), listen to one of these performances and if your system is even halfway decent, you’ll have a better idea of what "live" sounds like). Jon Hendricks’ voice moved forward, as though he stepped closer to the microphone, and his throaty quality was quite improved (and this is NOT a good recording - which is why I use it. It can be easier to hear improvements in poor recordings, provided they are vocal and usually recordings no later than 1976, when, it seems, pop recordings got worse). I then adjusted the rear foot: again, tiny incremental turn. THIS time, the soundstage became much more pronounced: I could hear back walls and a room surrounding the singers.

Without detailing each turn (there were only a few more, and in one case, I moved the back right hand foot counterclockwise (the previous turns were clockwise, as I dialed all 4 feet to the starting point, so the only way to go was clockwise). That turn was a noticeable improvement in small inflections of the voice, this time on Lady Sings the Blues (Motown had great music, but the WORST recordings of ANY major label I’ve ever heard), so anything one does is bound to make it sound better.
My music room is in two parts: the original house, and then the addition to the room/house, which has MUCH more solid flooring. The original flooring is a bit flexible (creaky). I can now jump up into the air two feet and come down on my heels, without the slightest feedback coming thru the speakers. (It usually manifested as a kind of "booooom" sound.) The Stillpoints (and I LOVE the Stillpoints) could not prevent the boom: the Townshend wins, hands down, in this application (turntable). Not even close. So, for those of you with spongy floors, the Townshend is likely the way to go.

I’m vehemently opposed to the idea that one can simply put a footer at/near the corner of a component and get good results. All that has ever demonstrated - for me - is the "tighter bass" that so many people post about when they get isolation footers. There is a point on EVERY component that frees the component from colorations and allows the music to whisper, shout, scream, bang or whatever is on the record waiting to come forth unfettered. If you’re unwilling to put in the time and experiment, you will be somewhat disappointed in your economic investment, but even less satisfied with your musical enjoyment.

I’ll have to listen to more records, but the Townshend certainly is in the lead by a long shot, ahead of the Nordost Sort Kones - which, in all honesty, I never warmed up to, but kept thinking it was "just me" (but I have not heard the Sort Fut footers), Stillpoints, Finite Elemente Cerapucs and Cerabases. Whenever I realize I’m RESPONDING TO the music, not LISTENING FOR the "sounds" (i.e., soundstage, imaging and other constructs), that’s a move forward. And remember, in other applications, the Stillpoints may match the Townsends. I won’t know that unless I spring for a second Townshend platform for the CJ preamp, which is supported by the Stillpoints. On that note, though, let me throw this out there: the CJ Classic 60 SE does NOT sound better on Stillpoints. Point of fact, it sounds best on its own feet. I do not know why, but it’s not debatable, not for me. I was nonplussed to discover that, let me tell you, and I could hear it the moment I pulled the system out of mute. I kept thinking "What the hell is going on?" I finally removed the Stillpoints, put the CJ back on the Maple block platform and the music returned.

I’ll put in the Conrad Johnson ET preamp and amp in a week or so, but even with a mere NAD C325BEE, one can get lost in music instead of criticizing the shortcomings. And that’s what we listen to music for, yes? To get lost and taken away.

My only regret is that isolation devices are so absurdly expensive, because, without superior isolation, you may not realize what is actually on the records. As I have said before, I believe: room acoustics, clean electricity and isolation are all intertwined. If you have one, but not the other two, it’s no good to have superior electronics: you can have good - even great - sound, but you won’t have magnificent MUSIC.

Next up is to turn on the Nola Thunderbolt subwoofers to see how much the low bass has improved. I was dazzled enough by the dialing in of the Townshend that I forgot to even turn ON the subwoofer. I think that says something in and of itself...

David, my solution is extremely inelegant. I use a maple chopping block (I have a Finite Elemente Spider Rack) which sits on the rubber feet on the Spider, and I just use a magic marker, which I draw circles around the footers on the maple block, since I’ve found even extremely small movements change the sound. Any footers sit on the maple block board (as does the Townshend platform) It still disturbs me that if I jar a tube trap out of position - even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an inch - I can hear that I’ve lost say, Janis Joplin’s raspiness when she sings "Summertime". And then I’ll spend 5 minutes ever so gently thumping the tube trap with the palm of my hand down towards the floor to get it back to where I hear that raspiness again. That happens because I brush up against them on my way in and out of the room on occasion. Also, I think the smaller the room, the more it matters on acoustic treatment, but also on isolation devices, such as footers or anything like that. In fact, back when Tom Miller and I were doing a review on the Audio Artistry Dvorak speakers (I think it was TAS issue 97 or so), he and I were discussing transient response and he said he thought it was a little ’blunted.’ I remember telling him to play with the tube traps a bit (because I’d had them longer than him - or anyone else, for that matter: I got mine in 1988. He got his in the mid 90s). He did and the next day I remember just, a propos of nothing, asking if he’d gotten any improvement out of the system and he replied that he’d moved the Tube Trap and the transient response improved noticeably. That was when I realized that even a slight movement could affect sonics. And while I’m remembering that, I also recall that when HP reviewed the Goldmund Reference, back in TAS 41, he mentioned in passing that the sound had been a bit darkish, and that Jeff Goggins, his then setup man had had to move the turntable out of the room and when he put it back in - and I remember PRECISELY what he said- he said Jeff gave the turntable a thorough cleaning and he returned it to the main room and that "maybe it wasn’t  precisely to the  micron replacement in the same spot it had occupied" - and he found it much less colored "much to this writer's utter consternation." So, he sold the seeds of insight even back then that WHERE you put something affects your end result. ( I have a rather startling photographic memory for anything written in a  review in early TAS, up to say, 1995 - but NO other magazine. However, I can never find the car keys, so clearly it's only with subjects I am focused on  to a laser-like intensity.)

Also, I use different color magic markers (sometimes I feel like I’m 5 years old and just learning how to draw when I see how many circles I’ve drawn around the location of the footers). But I then write it down on a piece of paper so that, if I ever have to disassemble anything, I don’t mistake the blue magic marker for the final - and best - result, for the red one, or black one. I have driven myself quite crazy at times, but for me, it’s all fun. It’s only a problem if I lose the paper I use to record changes in speaker location, or write observational notes to myself (the same thing I did as a reviewer).
In other words, keep notes...

@gbmcleod; out of curiosity whats the price tag on the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platform? I googled it but I want to know what I could expect to pay in USD and not the suggested manufactors suggest price?

Incidentally, in my last post, re: HP, I meant to say "he SOWED the seeds of insight even back then that WHERE you put something affects your end result." I’d suggest moving racks up and down the sidewall if you have the space to do it. Or anything else, for that matter, since the Tube Traps (at least in my 13’ x 20’ room) show an inordinate improvement when moved mere fractions of an inch. This seems to hold true no matter the room size. Even in my 24’ x 45’ basement, there were changes in the sonic landscape if I moved a trap fractions of inches. I’m sure that’s not the case in every single room, but in my apartments in San Francisco, that was the case and the house was more solid - and older - than the (East Coast) home I’m in now, which is an entirely different construction (drywall, instead of plaster, as my San Francisco Edwardian-era apartment was), so I have to believe that it holds true in most cases. I recall another time, when HP was reviewing a pair of Thiel speakers, he commented on the tube traps in an oblique way, saying they worked, but they required a certain amount of attention and he wasn’t sure he was getting the best out of them. So, it seems that ANYthing can be placed on a rack, floor, wall, wherever, with "great" results, but for exceptional results, one must put in the time. But the room I’m in now has ASC’s Wall Damp construction (resilient channels, two sheets of drywall [different thicknesses] and all the rest). Interestingly, the basement sounds more "real" than the 13 x 20 room - and the walls are concrete (back then, covered in some spots with boxes, tables, which could break up the 'arrival time' at the listening position). As I recall Robert E. Greene once saying in TAS, if you don’t think the room matters, try moving the equipment into a different room and listen. He’s got far more experience than I ever will...

LAK: the isolation platform is a little over $900.00... I know you can buy the footer "cells" on Audiogon without the platform itself for less. I actually thought of doing that, but decided that the turntable should be fully supported, so I opted for the platform.

Comments regarding the Townshend speaker pods and isolation theory in general that I posted this morning on the Lifting Cables off the Floor thread could have been posted here on this thread with equal relevance.

cheers, Geoff Kait