The Isolator: the latest rip-off?

Agree, the pricing for that little piece is crazy. Ok, opinions about pricing is different, but it is ugly, too. I mean, really ugly.

How about just adding Mass to the arm & seeing how it works. Blue tack or some other & then comparing. quite a lot of people believe added mass in the headshell area will aid the sound. I tried it & worked very well. Especially if you are using a low or medium effective mass tonearm. A high effective mass arm would yeild different results although your results might vary.

People who have not auditioned a product should not be allowed to condemn it. Most polymers do not look as if they have any special attributes, but they are designed to perform a certain function.

Judging a book by its cover can be a waste of everyone's time.

Opinions about efficacy aside, those who are amazed at the price should first try to make something like this themselves. As somone who has worked a long time making Fine Art sculpture editions, I can guarantee you'd be amazed how much time a seemingly simple object can take to fabricate. I gained an entire new understanding of why Black Diamond Racing products cost so much when I fabricated carbon fiber shelves and mats myself. I have no trouble believing that there are one to two hours labor involved in each "Isolators" manufacture. What do you pay your auto technician, plumber, or electrician for labor? Fifty to ninety bucks an hour. You have to remember economy of scale in manufacturing specialty items. It's a fallacy to compare pricing of a mass produced items with something made by one guy in a small workshop.

Back in the 60's, people used to add mass to their tonearms by using scotch tape to attach a penny to the headshell. I saw many a Garrard, Dual and BSR table in college dorm rooms with this. Then in the 70's, Ivor Tiefenbrun of a new company called Linn, and others, demonstrated the importance of the source in music reproduction. Prior to that, emphasis was largely on the speaker. Given that record groove information is measured in the billionth of inches, I don't think that many turntable/tonearm designers thought it was a good idea for the headshell to be loaded with weight which would mask subtle groove information. Since then, what has changed in the physics what is happening that would lead people today to suggest adding mass to a tonearm?