your thoughts on isolation footers

I have a friend in the office who spend thousands doing all sorts of mods to a wadia. He got all this fancy ball-bearing cr@p for the player to ride on. Come on... Just rip it all to the pc and forget all that bullsh.t.....

I used mapleshade ultimate tripplepoints under one of my sources and it made a huge difference... unfortunately it was dramatically for the worse. Made the sound bright, edgy and really sterile. As a result I ended up selling off a very nice source not realizing the true problem. Definitely do some experimenting with and without.

My brother used racket balls cut in half for his Arcam CDP. It improved the sound a little. Then I turned him on to vibrapods, improved the sound a lot over the racket balls.

I noticed an immediate undeniable difference w/ vibrapods. I think that anybody would on almost any system. They are very large so there is no problem balancing. The 'improvement' in my case was at least 90% for the better and maybe 10% for the worse, a trade off I can live with happily. They are very wide and thin so there should be no trouble balancing. They are also very affordable, considering the difference in sound quality they are an absolute steal.

I would recommend them to anybody who hasn't tried isolation devices, and to anybody who has and didn't feel they worked. They may not be the best isolators in the world (they are the only ones I have tried) but they work well, especially for the money.

One word: pandafeet
http://www.pandathumbaudio.com/

Well priced wobbly goodness.

Regarding all sorts of footers, you just have to try. They may work wonders, they may not do anything at all. It depends upon your gear, the general setup, the rack, the room...

edit: double post

next to magnetic levitation the ball bearing suspension is basically the best isolation you can have. do a rudimentary test between 3 racket balls and 3 pool balls with the bottom of the chasis laying directly on top of the balls.

not everyone agrees with your teqnique of ripping to hard drive either, so dont be judgmental until you actually experiment with differnt sources.

I tried isonodes from Bright Star Audio under my player. I was initially very happy because they did what they promised, tighter bass and better soundstage. Then after a week I realised they also killed the timing somehow, and it was a great relief when I took them out again. I think you just have to try these things to find what works for your system. The isonodes are pretty cheap, so I reckon it was worth a go.

I use Symposium shelves, a Bright Star sandbox for my CD transport, Black Diamond Racing cones for all components, and a BDR Shelf for my turntable. They make a considerable improvement in the presentation.

I use tenderfeet and baby booties from Herbie's Audio Lab. They're cheap compared to most of the audiophile alternatives and in my rig they've been noticably effective.

At some point in the future I'd really like to try a Bright Star Audio Air Mass platform however.

I know there's at least one design for a similar DIY pneaumatic platform floating around the web somewhere (it uses a bike tire from memory), but I'd rather just go for the 'real thing'.

All in all I think vibration control is a very interesting aspect of audiophillia which might be a little neglected compared with others.

It's not an issue of being judgemental. I'm approaching this from the standpoint of science, not fidelity. At the end of the day, a CD is digital data, nothing more, nothing less. The name of the game is simply the most accurate rendering of the digital bitstream present on the cd. All of the techniques that you are describing here are methodologies for increasing the accuracy of that bitstream. Ripping a cd to a hard drive, assuming that you are using quality ripping techniqes -- disabling drive caching, offset calibrations, accurate error detection and correction, lossless encoding, and online checksum validations -- if you have a successful (errorless) rip, then you have just guaranteed yourself that you have every 1 and 0 encoded on that disc. Once it's on a hard drive, you have now eliminated the optical read, which is the whole source of all the errors that you're trying to corrrect with these isolation devices. From then on, you have an errorless way of producing a digital bitstream for your DAC. The only possible issue that this technique introduces would be jitter, but there are ways of limiting and all but eliminating it - DACs that syncronize clocks to the source, or USB digital connections with extremely low jitter, etc.

Seriously, I'm not trying to put anyone down or turn this into mudslinging or anything. I just hate seeing people spending their hard-earned money on gadgets to try to eliminate errors from optical reads because they perform this error-prone data extraction repetitively, every time they play a cd. Instead, extract the data once and store it on different media that is not prone to the sort of errors that require vibration isolation.

My thoughts are that CD players do not need isolation footers, because the transport is already dampened to withstand vibration. Amps don't need them at all as there are not moving parts.

Of course, aesthetics always play a major role (and promote nice things like your cables ), but in isolation/dampening you should really try different approaches, even the ugly ones. Sorbothane footers such as the Pandafeet and Vibrapods are not *exactly* pretty, but can be highly effective, regarding both cost and result. Pandafeet are also small, so you can usually only see them from certain angles when looking at your rig.

Heat is not much of an issue, I quote pandathumbaudio:
"Sorbothane is engineered to operate at optimum performance at temperatures up to 160 degrees Fahrenheit. Damping will be reduced between 160 and 200 degrees, and use at temperatures above that is not recommended. As a general rule, if your amp is hot enough to burn you then it’s too hot to put Pandafeet under. Otherwise, there shouldn’t be a problem."

I know I come across like a Pandafeet salesman which I am not, nevertheless those little buggers saved me from having to throw away my constructed rack. Untreated, it made my rig sound terribly harsh. Treated, it is perfectly fine, with a nice improvement of bass contour.