Millercarbon, what are you using as Round Things? I notice you have the the words capitalized. Is "Round Thing" a brand? My google of the term couldn't find anything specific to a brand. What are they and what additional purpose do they serve, isolation redundancy and additional stabilization and balancing of the component?
Yes Round Thing is a brand. BDR began with DJ Casser as Black Diamond Racing making carbon fiber parts for America's Cup racing boats. Being a perfectionist audiophile he took aim at vibration control and developed everything you see in my system today.
But then he went and got cancer and died fairly young which just about killed the company. Apparently the family or someone is still making a few things today, but it seems only the easiest to make which is Cones. All the other stuff was extreme precision and absolutely gorgeous. After building my turntable and seeing how good it sounds there was a time when I thought about trying to manufacture turntables. So I went around showing a Racing Shelf (what he called them back then) to several fabricators and composites professionals in the Seattle area. Every single one of them was in awe. Well that was 30 years ago. Today Porsche has almost that level quality in the engine compartment of their Carrera GT. Imagine what DJ could have done if he had lived.
He started with Cones and the Shelf and then developed a whole series of Things, first square then Round as he learned that not only the material but its shape and dimensions determine its response to and control of vibration. Some are threaded to attach a Cone or attach to a component, some are dimpled to keep a Cone centered, some are threaded on one side dimpled on the other. Round Things are big, about 3.5" dia, Pits are smaller, all the same idea just one is better for bigger gear.
My Talon Khorus have 4 Cones screwed on pointing down and sit on 4 Round Things. Round Things completely eliminate the hassle everyone struggles with and spends a small fortune on trying to move big heavy speakers around on carpet. What a joke. Look at my system pics. My speakers are precision to zero of an inch. One nudge they move what you want and stay put.
Four is totally better than 3 and you will hear it. Its funny to think back 25 years, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, anywhere close to BDR.
Use 3 under components because as I said 3 points define a plane and therefore will be stable and not rock. Four however and no matter what anyone says is more stable. They have confused stability with the need to shim if a hard surface isn't absolutely flat.
You will want to experiment with placement both because they work even better in certain locations but also because many things mass isn't evenly distributed. Transformers are heavy and so one end or corner is a lot heavier than another.
Placement technique, for this or anything like it, slide one under the heaviest corner or side first. Lifting this way is stable as the lighter side is supported at two corners. Then lift one of those corners and slide a Cone under. Then do the last corner. Slide them around to where it seems most stable. Listen. Then if you're really ambitious try another configuration. But transformers vibrate, its inherent in their design, and they are massive, therefore the greatest benefit is to have a Cone close by to control that. You will see.
How these things work, the biggest obstacle to understanding is clearing your mind of all the misunderstood gobbledygook everyone is peddling about isolation. So let me start with that.
Forget about speakers and turntables for a moment and even CD players and think only about amps and power conditioners and things like that with no moving parts. These things all sound better on a good cone or rack, but why? It can't be environmental vibrations. I proved this myself quite by accident. Was doing a demo for a friend and kept the music playing the whole time. Yeah I do a lot of things different than your average audiophool, like none of the repetitive OCD playing the same thing over and over again. So anyway I lift it to remove the Cones and my friend says the instant I raised it in my hands he heard the sound collapse.
So think about that for a second. Because its awfully hard to find better isolation than holding in your hands. Your skin and tissue is soft as sorbothane, softer even. Your muscles cannot move faster than a few Hz, which is exactly what we struggle to design vibration isolation parts to achieve. So its isolated in your hands about as good as its ever gonna be. And it sounds bad. So its not isolation.
Its vibration control. Controlling or tuning vibration inherent in the component itself. Being isolated in and of itself accomplishes nothing. The component still generates vibration internally, and the whole thing becomes this vibrating mess. Which is a mess, because almost no one outside of turntables and speakers pays much attention to vibration control. Well I notice Raven uses solid billet aluminum and brass and stainless steel screws, Herron uses thicker circuit boards and casing, its not like nobody knows anything. But by and large its a low priority, if its a priority at all.
Now let's look at speakers, where this is even more true and obvious. Imagine a speaker somehow absolutely isolated, floating in air. You've got this Star Trek anti-gravity thing or whatever. Its exactly where you want it to be, only its floating free of every physical influence in the environment. Got it? Okay.
So now you play some music. The speaker drivers start moving back and forth. Remember your physics? Newton? Not theoretical make-believe word salad physics, actual action reaction physics. The physical reality where when you push against something, something has to push back, or you go nowhere. Those drivers are pushing against their mass, and also the resistance of the air.
It should be pretty obvious this isn't gonna work very well. The more massive the speaker the less this is a problem, which is one reason all the really good speakers are massive. (With the exception of ESLs, which some guys like, but we're too long already to be going into that now.) Making the speaker massive however is only mitigation and moving the problem one step down. Ultimately regardless of mass vibrations are being produced and need to be controlled. Its vibration control, not isolation.
All these different BDR products do this really well because they are very stiff, relatively massive (dense), and have inherently high damping factors. Its the mix of these 3 properties that makes them so excellent. Too much of one, not enough of the other, and you have something else. If you have something else then sure enough you can't use a lot of it like I do without screwing things up. Come hear my system, I can guarantee you will not be saying I screwed it up.
This past March I got the hankering to hook up my turntable. I quickly went down the rabbit hole and here I am. Aside from a new system I converted our sun room into a listening room and yea, I even bought a couple of White Hot Stampers! Next are power cords and room treatments. Does it ever end?
Probably what a lot are thinking by now: Does it ever end? Yes. But the quest for better sound? Never.
