Stillpoints Ultra SS vs spikes on concrete

Yo2tup, To be honest no. No better or worse.

Well, my Herbies decoupling gliders that are designed to go under spikes came today. I also got the big fat dots to go between the upper and lower speaker modules. I have Von Schweikert VR4Sr's on a maple wood over truss floor with standard VS spikes which are quite substantial.

First, I do not notice anything bad, no reduction of liveliness or naturalness. There is improvement with the Herbies even though the system already sounded great. For me there is better articulation in the very low bass, for example on the deep drums in Jennifer Warren's Way Down Deep. At higher volumes, particularly when the music has heavy bass and there are subtle things going on in the treble at the same time, the mids and highs sound clearer with The Herbies, plus a cleaner sound stage and less congealing on loud complex passages. So for less than $200 and a 90 return policy I am happy.

I have two listening rooms, one on the second floor and one on the foundation. In both the StillPoints Ultra SSs were by far the best isolation I ever heard. In part they isolate both ways from the floor upward and from the component downward, but they convert the motion to heat.

I think the Syn. Res. MIGs and big MIGs are a distant second best and far cheaper.

I have probably twenty isolation devices still in my possession but have tried many, many others.

Glad they worked out for you; I'll be curious if your observations change over the course of a week or two (not to play devil's advocate or anything ;-)).

I would bet that the Ultras would beat the Herbies but they were too rich for me at the moment as we have 2 kids in college, planning a wedding, and just dumped 5K into repairing cars. For me this experiment was to see whether devices proclaiming to turn vibrations into heat versus spiking would make an audible difference. Now that I have established that I can hear this difference, I'll be looking to compare to the Ultras when I get some scratch.