What are all these metal cans/pods sitting on top of electronics?

VPI brick blah blah honk honk.

 John Darko no.

The community will benefit from my most recent article for Dagogo.com just submitted a day or two ago. It will take on the subject of mass loading and several other tweaks. 

mass loading can help some equipment, can affect SQ

but as mentioned below... lots of streaming gear (and some phono stages) are small and light, need something on top to hold them down so cables can be attached securely and don’t shift stuff around

A bunch of us tried this tweak and it worked pretty good: purchase a big container of bee bees and multiple small plastic containers that measure 2”x 2”x 2” and fill this little containers with the bee bees. I placed multiple containers on each piece of equipment. A $20 tweak for multiple components.

Mass loading is a load of tripe.  Pure snake oil.   As others have mentioned; I sometimes place heavy objects (the stainless doorstops work nicely) on small electronics to prevent the cables dragging them around.  

I also do this for my multiport USB chargers.