inna: my experience is that the electricity can be good, but if your components are vibrating, you will lose the musical lines in a symphony or anything else. I have tried nearly everyone’s isolation feet: Up until a few months ago, I used Nordost and Stillpoints footers (more the Stillpoints than the Nordost. Much more.) But one day, 3 or 4 months ago, I came across a thread asking about the latest generation of the Townshend Seismic devices. (I have a Seismic Sink, which I’ve had since 1994, which I can’t use because I don’t have the pump for it.) I hadn’t really thought of them, although I had Townshends ribbon tweeters 3 years ago. After reading the thread and then the review on Positive Feedback, I thought, hmmm... why not try out their current isolation feet? (I could always return them if they didn’t work great.)
WHOA! New ballgame. Neither the Nordost nor the Stillpoints did what the Townshends do, which seems to be, to remove ALL vibration (but again, the footers must be placed EXACTLY). Not being a technical anything (!), I can’t speak to the technology, only the results. The sound field is much larger, as though I moved from row 15 to row 8 in Carnegie Hall. The musical lines hold together fairly well (that’s the speakers’ limits) even during an fortissimo. A tuba actually "breathes" and you can hear the "blattiness" that makes it so distinctive. In fact, the whole bass range is extremely "present." Now, my electricity has always pretty good. And I’ve had Audience Adept, PS Audio, Bybee, and Shunyata AND Nordost power conditioners. All very good. Sound was great. But when I put in the Seismic Platform (under my turntable), that was the moment I realized that vibration was a major player, too. And, even with the platform, it took me at least 2 months before I realized that the feet needed to be optimally placed under the component and rotated (they’re on a bolt, and can be moved upward and downward). I put it in 3 other systems I set up for friends and had to adjust them each time (just the height of the pods themselves mainly, but as I moved them underneath the equipment front to back and side to side ( I had, by that time, also gotten a set of just the pods with no platform on top of them, because I knew I'd have to insulate the preamp as well as the turntable), I could hear the difference between "great" and "exceptional." And so could my one friend, who goes to the symphony every two weeks and listens to music (on his stereo) without speaking until the song is over. We played "I Am A Rock" (Simon and Garfunkel) and the second time we played it, I had rotated the isolation pod a minuscule amount. And I DO mean MINISCULE. Nonetheless, suddenly - as he put it - "I can hear AIR around Simon’s voice." And he was right: I heard it as well. (You could also hear how nasal Simon's voice was: it was like hearing INSIDE his head, it was SO evident). I wrote the importer, Dan Meinwald, and told him what I’d observed about the placement, the rotation, everything. And he agreed. Not only that, but the springs on the damn thing must be COMPLETELY VERTICAL. It’s possible to have the bottom part of the spring slighted angular from top to bottom. Imagine a clock and the springs angled at a 1 o’clock - 7 o’clock positioning. Nuh uh. It HAS to be VERTICAL: NOON TO 6 o’clock ONLY. Don’t know why that's so. Just know that it is. I subsequently learned they must be - one at a time - raised and lowered for the very best results so that, if I’m playing, say, Abbey Road by the Beatles, I can hear Paul and John’s voices separated in space and in harmony and can follow each one individually. Otherwise, without that exactitude, that last piece of "magic" is just not there.
So, I put complete isolation right up there with electricity. And now I know why people have gone thru such lengths as putting the equipment in an adjoining room, but how many of us can do that??? And, of course, the room itself, which, without "fixing" it as much as possible (I have 30-40 tube traps), will still leave you in the dark about how good your system actually sounds. I would tie all 3 together in first place. Any one of them out of whack, and the proverbial cake will fall flat. It’s no surprise to me that people argue (and not very nicely these days) about whether any given device is as good as others say.