Stillpoints....Audio crack?

[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by Vintage Pete

Stephen....I've read of some cases here and there where a user wasn't happy with his results with Stillpoints. Not many, however, and I've heard pretty much nothing but positive reports on their effectiveness with McIntosh. I consider their chassis construction to be robust, but of course everything is relative.

Hey Pete,
I've just found that you need to try different types of footer solutions under dfferent components or devices, there's no one "perfect solution" for every thing or every application. This is because there is a lot of variation with respect to different components, their function or the functional responses they produce, and how vibration or mechanical energy may impact that specific function in particular. And, as well, how the component is constructed and the materials it's made from, what it's resting on, etc. The clocks in digital devices, in particular, are very sensitive to vibration, for example.

First time I put a set of EVPs under my REL sub, it was a revelation because it made...the room itself significantly quieter.

Originally Posted by Vintage Pete

You bring up a topic that has crossed my mind-and that is the use of isolators, whether they be Stillpoints or another brand on power devices-distributors, regenerators, etc. In my case, I wonder if there would be a sonic benefit utilizing isolators beneath my PS Audio DirectStream Power Plant P12 Regenerator?

I don't know. You'll have to try it and see. For your PS Audio, I'd try not just isolators, but hard, dense footers as well. The Shunyata SSF-50s are excellent under power distributors because they have excellent impulse transfer speed. You might also find the HRS Nimbus couplers and spacers would work well. This is high-end audio, it's complex because devices and funtions interact*, it's not the OFAT (One-Factor-At-A-Time) approach to experimentation we're taught in school. The REAL WORLD is complex and often, or, more accurately, usually, driven by interactions and..susceptible to noise factors☨.

So..you have to be a scientist. You have to do controlled experiments and keep a lab notebook. You have to try things and also examine, sometimes, multiple factors at once that interact.

If you look at the panel at the lower left of this graphic, entitled "Interaction Profiles", which is a DOE I did to optimize integrating my sub to my 2-channel mains, you can see there is an interaction between sub gain and crossover, because the red and blue lines are converging.



*–Interactions are common in science and engineering, yet students are never taught to consider them in their OFAT approach. An interaction that is particularly common in chemistry and engineering is...the Time*Temperature interaction. Wanna bake some cookies? Well, the Time*Temperature interaction is what results in a properly baked cookie. Not time, not temperature, the INTERACTION is what is important.

☨–when I refer to noise factors here, I'm referring to "statistical noise", factors that shift the functional reponse (mediated by a transfer function) off the mean or median, or add variance, or add both. All functional responses have some level of "noise" as there are no perfect transfer functions in the real world.

Cheers, Pete!