Footers/Shelf Material

Dekay, "the parts connection" can be found at www.sonicfrontiers.com/tpc/. There are lots of goodies there, albeit not necessarily at the best price. Download their entire catalogue and have a look through it. The E-A-R feet are in there somewhere (page 76 in the version I downloaded last week), but you may find it interesting what else you can buy while you are at it. If the Vibrapods are tipping things up above the middle of the midrange, then I think you will really like the E-A-R feet. I found the E-A-R feet better than Vibrapods with my tube monoblocks, as well as with my front-end. Cornfedboy, four of the large E-A-R feet will hold up to 80lbs.

Hi Ken and all. To answer your question Ken, I am trying the various shelves and footers with three different systems and am trying to progress by following the path that sounds good with all three systems. This way, I am hoping I don't go down some blind alleys. Without listing the three systems fully, the sources are (1) Theta Data III and Theta Gen Va; (2) Meridian 500 and Meridian 566-24; and (3) Sonic Frontiers SFCD1. Today I received two pieces of Maple Butchers Block (kindly supplied by Brulee - thanks, I will email you separately Bruce). I was ready for them to sound bad, because I had tried some similar blocks made from local timbers (NZ timbers are unlike much else as our growing conditions are almost unique) and they all sounded "nice" but slow. But I have to say the Maple sounds great - overall better than Corian - the Corian sounding pinched and thickened in the upper treble by comparison. I will need to play around some more, but the Maple definitely has a "sound" and I imagine that used everywhere in a system it may sound too much, and possibly just a tad "slow" - but so far I like what I hear with two shelves in place (out of five shelves in my main system). I am heading towards Neuance shelves under my front end, and Maple under my monoblocks (which are too heavy for the Neuance shelf) - everything sitting on E-A-R feet. Footers are a vexing area. They all seem to be band-aids in one way or another. Most of the "audiophile" footers accentuate the outlines of sound (sounding more exciting or detailed) in some way. But I have eventually settled on the E-A-R feet because they give you the detail without losing any of the body of the sound, and I find they do this over a wide range of components. Garfish - Sonic Frontiers stuff is about the most immune to vibration I have come across - its sound changes the least through tweaking - because they make the boxes right in the first place. Brulee is right that there is a degree to which you can use this stuff to voice a system, but you can also use it to improve a system's transparency. The same is true of all system components. This problem of knowing when we are merely changing the sound rather than improving it is always with us. I look for simple pointers like "naturalness" (where cones and sorbothane fail), "speed" (where sinks fail) and "even-handedness" (where Vibrapods and cones fail).

To add to my previous point - ie. improving versus merely changing the sound. I perceive a problem in this vibration control area in that most of the products on the market are designed to the wrong criteria. Instead of trying to be heard less, they are trying to be heard more. One can understand this because people will want to hear a significant change in the sound when they invest in a footer. But what this leads to is footers that hype some part of the sound. This can obviously lead to the symptoms Garfish and Brulee refer to. Yet products like the E-A-R feet would be hard to sell for $50 each because they do so little to the sound.

Dan2112 - I am only just getting to grips with the Butchers Block and perceive some small problems, but they are small. I have stated above that the E-A-R feet are great with hard shelves and still hold to that. But I don't call the Butchers Block or MDF hard. With these softer shelves I tend to prefer cones. With softer shelves I also like supporting them with up-turned spikes (like most steel shelves have), but with hard shelves a thin piece of hard synthetic rubber between rack and shelf seems best (Note that Mana racks do not hold to this last rule - always use spikes). So far the Neuance seems to work more like a hard shelf and the Butchers Block more like a soft shelf. So it is E-A-Rs between components and the Neuance and cones between components and the Butchers Block (I think). So far with the Butchers Block the sound is wonderfully open, detailed, extended at the extremes, dynamic and with a realistically large soundstage - but just a tad slow (only very slightly) and there is a very fine grain (that I am working on reducing). Hope this clarifies. I have ordered more Neuance shelves and will probably only really know how good they are when I have more than just the one - but it is very very fast, with no significant resonant peaks.

I hate it when I speak too soon. I am probably doing it again but want to correct my last post. I have gone back to the E-A-R feet between the monoblocks and the Maple Butchers Block, but am supporting the Maple with Mana sound frames - thick rigid steel, spiked up and down. And it sounds good. The cones didn't quite work on more extended listening. I will probably shut up now until I have tried this out for longer as well as in the other systems I am using.

Jadem6, I have two boards of 454mm * 354mm * 57mm (or approx 18.5" by 14.5" by 2.25" for the metrically challenged). To my knowledge they were cut from a large piece of Maple Butchers Block and are made up of glued pieces of Maple, not a solid block of Maple. I find it to be good, but not as good as the Neuance shelves. However the Neuance shelves cannot support the weight of my monoblock amps and so that is where I use the Maple. I really need more time to be more definitive, but I would recommend you look into the Neuance shelves as they seem to me to be a better idea, being faster, more transparent and less colored. The Beta version of the Neuance is able to support my Theta gear which are around 40lbs each, so it is really only large amps that cannot be accommodated. If you do try them then you should be aware that they need about a day to settle. When you first put the Neuance in place the sound will be warm and mushy, and then over the next two days all will clear up. You get the best of everything with the Neuance; neutral without peakiness, speed and extension, fine detail without smearing. Iswear I can almost identify the brand of guitar strings there is so much clean detail and natural color.

Hi Ernie - I have just finished posting to the one you refer to - I must be following you around. My reference to the E-A-R footers was for between Neuance shelf and component, whereas Ken's was for between rack and shelf - I believe. In fact I have found that if you use the Neuance shelf correctly (ie. on a welded steel shelf, spiked up and down, no sand-filling etc) then the sound is just great with a component's standard feet. Where the E-A-R feet come in is this - once you have used the Neuance properly, then all fancy footers sound gross, the only thing that I have found that sounds OK is the E-A-R. The E-A-R adds warmth, bloom and a very liquid smoothness without upsetting PRAT and resolution noticeably. Probably ideal for taming the highs you have been trying to do for a while. But too many E-A-R in the system can take away immediacy and openness. For example, in one system we preferred to use a fair number of E-A-R feet under the components, but when we swapped out the Siltech cable for the Coincident cable or the Wireworld cable, we preferred to take all of the E-A-R feet out. So I found the E-A-R feet did not undo the effect of the Neuance and was a reasonably successful way of getting the right balance of openness and immediacy with warmth and liquidity.