I am about to buy the Ultra Minis. I had ordered them from Music Direct - whose website said "3-7" days before they shipped. 20 days later, they had still not shipped, so I cancelled the order.
I have had considerable experience with Goldmund Cones, Cerabases, Cerapucs, Cera anything you can name, and many other manufacturers devices. Shaktis, which go on top of things instead of under them work under the same principle, and that principle is this: placement is the b**** of all isolation devices. Tube traps are the same, and I've had them since ASC opened in 1984. If items are not precisely placed, you will think you have lost your marbles and be disappointed. NO. You must spend the time moving them around. And when you move ONE and it sounds very good, LEAVE IT ALONE and then work on the second isolation device until it improves something really well. Then go to the third. Once you have things properly placed, where they do the most good, you can get to excellent. Roy Gregoy has the same mindset about this. Tom Miiler, in one article in TAS, warned that, if you thought you were going to plunk down (I think it was the RoomTunes) the devices and they were going to work, you were sadly delusional. Everything has a point where it reaches 98% of its potential, and anywhere else it is only at 70, and that's where many people lose their joy - and hope. |
I have Ultra Minis.
BY this time, Roy Gregory has weight in on The Audio Beat, a web magazine.He suggested line conditioner first, then amp, the preamp, the cd player, because, he says, power supplies generate tremendous noise and move them on into the components.
I put them under my ASL Hurricanes and heard a significant difference. However, it wasn't until the appeared under the Power Plant P300, that I truly "heard" them. Good Golly, Ms. Molly! The presentation came TO LIFE!!! Individual instruments, heretofore, playing along with a Geritol-type sameness, dynamically speaking, stood out as if they were doing solo turns. On the next Boxed set of Mecury Living Presence CDs, CD #23 with Farley, Grainger and someone else, and conducted by Fennell, it sounds as thought instruments are no longer playing in an auditorium with 100% humidity and 80% dew point. It's as though the dew point went down to 45 and the humidity 50. Subtle intstruments are obvious within the mix, ones that before you heard, but only has a "sound" never an instruments whose identity you could identify.
Nope. These are real deal.
Caveat: You MUST play with placement. A casual "lets-put-'em-here" toss will yield you less than stellar results. In fact, you'll wonder what all the fuss is about. |
TBG:
I suppose it is interesting, as an example of the capriciousness of this site's login issues.
The site kept telling me I had the wrong username and password - this, AFTER I had signed in to "My Page." I deleted cookies, closed down the computer, brought it up, and the site STILL gave me the exact same message. Fortunately, the first time it did that I copied and pasted my post into the "TextEdit" on my Macbook.
I'd like to try the Ziplexes. Who sells them?
By the way, my 2 meter Nordost Frey 2 arrived at my dealer's today. Installed them (in place of the 1 meter pair, since I needed longer lengths to go from preamp to amps. Longest pair of Nordost I've ever bought. $$$!!!) They actually sound quite good out of the box, unlike earlier models. Highly musical. And tomorrow, the Nola Contenders arrive! My cup runneth over, not to mention my electronics repair person informed me that the Hurricane amp was repaired and ready for pickup (I love my Hurricanes: their realism is astounding, regardless of their not being "tops" in the resolution sweepstakes). But back to the Stillpoints.
I'm completely thrilled with the Minis. I expected them to be great - but they are closer to "fantastic". Astonishingly so. Were I to have a state of the art system - or something close to it, or even if I upgrade further - I'll try the next Stillpoint models. For now, this is splendid! |
I must say, there must be a reason the Stillpoints don't work under some devices.I wonder if there is some material in the device that prevents them (the Stillpoints) from demonstrating their magic. Must be some powerful voodoo in those other components hexing the Stillpoints. It is not, after all, an electrical interface. It is a vibational one. Unless all vibration is gone, this is a mystery to me. The closest I can come to the proverbial "curse" on a component/tweak not working is when I had the Black Diamond Racing Rack sitting on my Finite Elemente Spider Rack and put footers under an NAD C326BEE. The sound was grainy, like 800-speed film and NO dimensionality (not an inherent trait of the NAD BEE series amps). I couldn't fathom it. Eventually, I took out the Black Diamond Rack and put the NAD directly on the rubber pucks. VOILA! It sounded like the NAD. When I spoke to someone knowledgable about it, they posited that the Black Diamond, the Spider Rack and the footers I was using were "fighting" each other. It made sense, since the removal of the footers and the BDR Rack caused the NAD to sigh in relief, "That Fool. What the hell was he doing?!?!?! Putting competing technologies all together like that and not even testing it one technology at a time."
I never did that again. If I want a hard shelf on the Spiders, I just use maple board instead of MDF, and THEN put the component on that, as I did today. THEN, after listening to a few cuts, I inserted the Stillpoints. OH, BABY, give it TO me!!! LOL. It sounds great. I wandered in and out of the music room at several points during the evening tonight, thinking (delusionally) that the Frey had magically gone thru a time warp and broken in, but MAN, even un-broken in, it sounds as dynamic as hell, with instruments within sections jumping out towards you. Not a "reserved" sound in the least! It's like standing in front of a tiger's cage at the zoo: the tiger looks at you for a bit, not blinking, then quite suddenly rises to his feet, walks toward the edge of the cage...and before you can react, growls and simultaneously swipes at you thru the bars. Of course, you're too far back, but you still blink - if not let out a gasp and jump backwards, caught off guard by the suddenness of the tiger's lunge.
This would be, in audio terms, of the same speed with which the Stillpoints allow the (sudden) release of the dynamic inflections, as well as the dynamic outbusts, contained within a recording. |
Tbg:
If you read Gregory's review on The Audio Beat website, he clearly states one must place the isolation devices directly into contact with the component and he states that removing it in any way from direct contact with the component has deleterious effects. Perhaps that accounts for your experience. I couldn't say myself. Just a speculation. |
I agree with your statement, Fleschler: the room is an extremely important part of the quality. I have used components in 4 rooms: 2 in San Francisco, in which one room was narrow (I didn't know about first reflection points then), but the speakers were at the bottom of the "L" shaped room and therefore had access to the entire apartment. Then moved again and had a room with a concave ceiling back in 1988. That room sounded okay, and I used Sonex (too much) but had stellar imaging. Another room was 13 x 27 with 10 foot ceilings. Got great sound from that. The most recent two are here on the East Coast and the first room was my basement: 23 x 45. Of all the rooms, that one was fantastic, but I had to put RT-13 insulation between the ceiling joists (unfinished basement, joists just as it would be in a ranch built in 1965) and concrete walls and floor. I had to put area rugs in front of the speakers, and hauled the 30 or so tube traps into service. Despite the low ceiling, that room is easily the most transparent. However, I had an addition built onto the house and the new room, while good - and has a 10' ceiling in the new part (8' in the old) is no match for the basement where you could nearly just "drop" the speakers into any area and they sounded better (and this with water pipes and heating ducts overhead and the basement is only 7'6" high to begin with).
I heard my CD player many years ago in the rom of Tom McFaul, who wrote the Meow-Meow cat commercials. His living room is around 30 x 50 (bigger than my mother's ranch) and his setup atrocious, but the speakers he had (cheap Infinitys) had so much open space, they didn't care. Sounded astounding, given his speaker cable was cheap, he didn't even have speaker stands for the speakers AND the speakers were just 'thrown' into the back part of the room (where a grand piano was directly to the side of one speaker).
Room comes first: everything else is the equivalent of 4th place. |
Five years later...in case I didn't mention it before, the Stillpoints - at least the Ultra Mini Risers - must be moved around underneath the device to find the spot where they suppress resonances best. And that is not always the four corners of your component. I suggest you move them one at a time. When you get improvement on one riser, leave it alone and go to the next one.
TAS had an article two years ago, done in what I thought was a very scientific method: the writers moved the location of all the various footers (Stillpoints, Nordost and others) and were surprised to find that the location of the footers contributed greatly to the sonics. So did Roy Gregory when he reviewed them. Don't just throw them under the corners of components and think you've mastered their sound. You haven't even begun the long hours of finding the "sweet spot," as the authors found out. |
