The Center Stage 2m footers are extremely impressive. I’ve been through many footers: Nordost Sort Kones, Stillpoints and several other top footers. I previously used the Stillpoints, but read about these 2M footers (in TAS) and decided to get a set.
At this point, with the experience I’m having with them in the system, I’d rather keep my current electronics and just get two or three sets of footers. The substitution of better electronics would not, I fear, bring the music to Life in this way. Apparently, removing all vibration can yield some staggeringly great results. I can’t even imagine that if I went back to Jadis or VAC electronics that this same result could be achieved. One need look no further than playing a good recording of a particular singer, and be awestruck by how the voice sounds vastly more the way it does in life. I’d just played a Cleo Laine CD which was nearby, and in this, her return to Carnegie Hall (the album is 1975), her voice is quite lifelike in the way it "moves."
It’s too bad they’re so expensive. If they were only $700 instead of $1100, it still wouldn’t be an insubstantial purchase, but it would certainly allow a (slightly) wider set of people to hear what their electronics are truly capable of. And there would be substantially more benefit than one could get even by spending $5,000. Superb isolation has no substitutes. I would have been happy with the Stillpoints had I not heard about these babies and then tried them out (I like places with 60-day returns. It allows time to live with a component). And, having lived with them for a month? No way I could go back to anything less now. Except for (eventually) getting a new integrated and a pair of Magnepans 2.7i, I’m real good.
Try these little suckers out, but you must give them the full 10 days of putting some component on them and then not touching them or the component again. You cannot move them, even an inch or two, for at least the next 10 days. Fourteen would be better. Just put them under a component (any digital or even your line conditioner would be the best place to start), listen at the 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 10 day mark. 10 is where it gets magical. Oh, and you will not like how they sound at the beginning. You might even think something's wrong with your system. It's not. These things will make you wonder while they're going through whatever settling they do, though. So, expect it.