HRS Isolation damping plates

I just tried these and they improved things a lot when I play loud music with low bass. I tried "lowly material" but it just moved the problem around.

My electronics are between the speakers (bad idea, but I have no alternative). As a result, the top panels of all my components vibrated quite a bit when I played it loud, especially when the song had low bass. The Lyngdorf 2200 is known to respond well to SOTA vibration control. Stillpoints helped it a lot so I figured these damping plates might be a win. They were.

Adding one HRS damping plate reduced the vibration quite a bit. One more helped but its not as dramatic as the first one. Lowly material doesn't reduce the vibration nearly as much as these plates. Sound quality improvement correlated with the reduction in vibration observed.

IMHO some of these newer vibration control products (Stillpoints, Cerapucks, HRS stuff) have some physics backing them up. Look at how Stillpoints work - its a long way from a tiptoe. These plates have some interesting combination of high compliance and the right amount of mass to damp out the vibration. I suppose if you could find material with the right compliance you could duplicate what they are doing. But life is short and they aren't that expensive.........

Every time HRS damping plates were listed on Audiogon, I missed the opportunity to buy them. In the interim, I purchased damping disks from Herbie's and they do work as advertised. I would however like to try the HRS damping plates to see if there's a difference so if anyone's selling, let me know.

SYMPOIUM Fat Patz work very very well they dont overdamp witch is great. Work great on transformers of tube amps and solid state.

I have 2 of the 9 1/2" x 4 1/2" plates; one atop my Marantz RS15SA SACD player, and one on my CJ MF2250 power amp. You can notice a difference in imaging and the plates tighten up the bass considerably. In terms of A/B comparisions; it requires a very good ear and very little delay between samples. Use for test material bass laden tracks with already good imaging and localization. You can feel the difference the HRS plates make as well by resting a light finger atop a component while the music is playing, do it first with then without the plate and you'll notice a significant difference. It logically follows that this reduced external vibration would translate into better sound. Solid State components with heavy chassis and no moving internal parts show little improvement, but any CD player or transport will benefit from a HRS plate placed above the disc mechanism. The smallest plate is adequate for this application. I've seen components completely covered by these plates as they are sized to accommodate this (usually 3 of the biggest 14" plates will cover an entire component). I haven't tried this myself, but I would rather do that then spend money on bases, feet, and discs because the improvement is a known entity, and I feel that the other options are more subjective with varying results.

I use both the damping plates and the pucks and the light turntable weight. The better the resolution of your equipment the more difference you will discover. I'm pretty sceptical about these sorts of things but the differences are clear: blacker background, more detail especially bass detail. Too much can be a good thing, I tried an HRS isolation table under my turntable (suspended) and it killed the dynamics. Very good value system improvement though, especially the turntable weight.