As I write this I’m sitting on an Airbus A320 in a window seat just behind the wing, marveling at the majesty of the Colorado mountains. I’m returning home to the SF Bay Area after spending a long weekend with my friend and fellow audiophile Aaron who lives with his family in Pittsburgh.
It was a fun and satisfying visit. Aaron and I were joined by Bill, a friend of Aaron’s who, along with his wife Andreea, have made a more recent entry into this whacky hobby. We all spent 3 days playing Hot Stampers and making changes to each of their stereos. I’m pleased to say, with some help from me, they both made a lot of progress in a relatively short time.
This trip has left me thinking a lot about the mistakes we audiophiles make on the often meandering path to better sound. Lord knows I’ve made more than my fair share in the 40+ years I’ve been at this, and I’m sure I’ll make plenty more. Fortunately, I manage to learn something from just about every misstep. If only I could learn even half as much from my mistakes in some other areas of my life, I’m sure I’d have a lot fewer headaches!
Increasingly I’m convinced that, as frustrating as making poor choices in audio can be, they are a necessary rite of passage for any audiophile who endeavors to build a system that sounds as good as an analog system can, which is shockingly good. As I was listening to Aaron’s and Bill’s systems, I realized that they were now both in the unique position of being able to benefit from all the mistakes I’ve made and what I’ve learned making them.
Mistakes in audio run the gamut from choosing the wrong equipment to setting it up poorly to failing to test it properly to even choosing the wrong records to test it with. But there’s one particularly insidious mistake that all of us make – making a system change that seems right and then convincing ourselves of it. Then we move forward with that change, undermining our further efforts with what is now a fundamentally flawed approach to better sound.
To make matters worse, an entire industry has built up around this mistake, taking advantage of the very fact that audiophiles make it. Unintentionally, the audio business has evolved to offer solutions to the mistakes audiophiles make by offering even more flawed choices with which to “correct” them. These solutions come in the form of a near-endless stream of products that are presented as cures for what ails our poor stereos.
System a bit light on bass? Try this pair of interconnects. Lacking energy and impact? This amp should do the trick. Or this set of speaker cables. Or for that matter this latest model of speakers. How much money did you say you had to spend? The big wide world of audio and the choices it offers can make your head spin. Practically does in fact. Can anyone say Linda Blair?
The solution? Plain and simple, we must find and exorcise the mischie-causing demons that are the enemies of great sound, lest we find ourselves spinning hopelessly on the never-ending, forever “upgrading” audio hamster wheel.
Luckily for Aaron and Bill, they had already been given some very good advice about what equipment to buy and what records to play with it. From their cartridges and tonearms all the way to their speakers, Aaron and Bill had been building their systems in essentially the same way I had. It made my work a whole heck of a lot easier to walk into a demo and not have to recommend a host of equipment changes that would be time consuming and expensive. All I needed to do was rearrange the deck chairs, or so to speak.
Aaron was pretty far along already. He’d made some significant upgrades to his electrical wiring that appeared to be giving his system more speed, excellent transparency and a very clean, clear top end. This was no doubt helped by the fact that he’d also added most of the isolation components I’d recommended.
We made some important adjustments to his turntable setup, and I helped him customize his speaker wire. These, along with some additional loading to his Townshend platters, added significant bass, giving his records the weight they needed to balance all that his system was doing right in the upper midrange and top end.
In Bill and Andreea’s case, I found I had a little more work to do. With the equipment they had, the sound should have been a lot better than it was, and I wasn’t sure at first how exactly to move forward. It also didn’t help that they had just served me a delicious meal, a fine bottle of wine and now some exceptional whiskey to round out the evening. Thus, afraid of overstepping, I hesitated to make a suggestion about one particular part of his system that I suspected was the primary mischief-maker. Fortunately, I just couldn’t help myself, and B & A were graciously receptive to my advice.
Bill had recently bought a pair of Legacy Focus 2020s, and he’d started out by placing them directly onto his hardwood floor. Although relatively new to audio, it didn’t take Bill long to hear how this speaker placement was not at all good for the bass, which, with 6 twelve-inch woofers, is prodigious and needs managing. So on the advice of a salesperson at his local audio store, he chose to install some Isoacoustics GAIA I speaker isolation feet on the bottom of his 2020s. Sure enough, getting his speakers up off the floor helped the sound a lot.
In fact, the improvement was significant enough that Bill decided to put Isoacoustics products under just about everything else in his system. When we started the demo, he had a set of GAIA Is under each speaker and various sized Isoacoustics pucks under his turntable, turntable motor, phono preamp and amp.
Before this I had no experience with Isoacoustics products. I had heard good things from a friend, and was aware that they were a well-regarded product, but I’d never tried them myself. Meanwhile, Bill and Andreea, who both happen to be scientists and therefore no strangers to proper testing and methodology, assured me that they had A/B tested the addition of each and every one of these Isoacoustics feet and pucks, and that these tests had left them both satisfied, if not convinced, that the Isoacoustics footers were helping the sound in every area of their system.
Despite my unfamiliarity with Isoacoustics footers, I was intimately familiar with nearly all of the other components in B & A’s system. Therefore I immediately suspected that the problems I was hearing had to do, at least in part, with all the footers. But with B & A convinced of their efficacy, I decided that instead of tackling this issue head on, I would take a more indirect tact and see what improvements we could make elsewhere.
I noticed that B’s speaker wire, the Audtek wire I recommend, wasn’t installed properly (he had bi-wired the 2020s using both the “A” and “B” outputs on his amp). I suggested we reinstall it the way I knew it would sound better, and this did in fact substantially improve the sound of his system.
B & A had tried the buckwheat pillow that I use in my system under the E.A.R. 324 phono preamp they’d recently acquired, and they weren’t convinced it was helping. So instead they’d put some of the smaller Isoacoustics pucks under the E.A.R., and afterwards thought it sounded better than with the pillow. Again, having never tried the Isoacoustics pucks, for all I knew they were right.
Nevertheless, now that I felt I’d established a little more credibility with the change to the speaker wire, I suggested trying the buckwheat pillow again. We played a Hot Stamper of Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album, swapped the Isoacoustics pucks for the pillow, and then played it again. Afterwards, B & A reluctantly agreed with my assessment. It sounded better with the buckwheat pillow than with the Isoacoustics pucks.
Next I floated the idea of removing the pucks under the amp, and that also helped the sound. Seeing that the suggestions I was making were helping, Bill pulled out a set of the Better Cables Silver Serpent Air interconnects I’d recommended but that he’d chosen not to use. Instead he’d installed a different set of cables that he thought were better and that had cost him twice as much. We swapped the cables, and again the sound improved, pretty substantially in fact.
As the evening went on it became increasingly clear to all of us that the quickest route to improving his system started with removing the Isoacoustics footers under anything and everything he had them under. By the next day, Bill had already contacted Townshend Audio and ordered a custom sized Seismic Platter for his rather large VPI Aries and the dual motor system he’d bought to run it, both of them currently sitting on custom maple blocks with Isoacoustics pucks underneath.
Bill had also dragged Andreea to Home Depot to buy a couple of rather large concrete pavers. He wanted to see if putting his Legacy Focus 2020s up on the pavers, rather than on the wood floor but still with the GAIA IIIs installed, would sound better. He tested it as soon as he got them home, and he and Andreea both felt the sound was better with the 2020s on the pavers.
That evening I visited again. B & A seemed excited to hear my reaction to this latest “improvement.” We put on Aaron’s White Hot Stamper of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and sat down to listen. I started to squirm. Something did not sound right to me at all. The upper midrange lacked focus, and the tonality was off.
“So what do you think?” they asked me. “It doesn’t sound right to me,” I reluctantly admitted, and then I described what I’d heard. Before I knew it, Bill had tipped the speakers over onto the floor and started pulling the rather heavy concrete pavers out, landing them on the carpet in front of his stereo with a massive “THUD.” We listened again and it was better. “But there’s something about the concrete that I like,” he said. “It sounds somehow cleaner.” Aaron concurred.
Suddenly, he had the speakers tipped over again and did the thing I’d been hoping he’d do for the last 24 hours. He took the GAIA IIIs off. Then he slid the speakers with no footers onto blankets draped over the concrete pavers. We played “Billie Jean” again, at which point it was clear to all of us that this was the best Bill and Andreea’s stereo had sounded, ever. It was open, tonally right and thoroughly engaging. I was honestly a little surprised at how good it was, and by extension, how much the GAIAs had been hurting the sound.
Along with the Townshend platter, Bill had also ordered two sets of Dayton Audio speaker stands that I use and recommend. I left their house feeling pretty confident that his system would sound even better once he got them installed under his 2020s and set them back up on the pavers. It seemed, for the time being at least, my work was done.
I felt gratified that I’d been able to offer so much help. Bill and Andreea’s system had gone from a rather run of the mill audiophile system to a dynamite one in the space of 2 days. Leaving aside the fact that he’d ordered the Townshend platter, which was costly, he was only out 20 bucks for the pavers and had a stack of Isoacoustics footers ready to put up on US Audiomart with several more in the queue for when he got his platter. I’d venture to say that, even with the cost of the Townshend platter, B & A came out ahead.
Certainly the sound of their system had. Wow! Before I left Bill played me his White Hot Stamper of The Songs of Leonard Cohen. It was heavenly! The sound of his system had leaped ahead dramatically, but even more importantly, his now rather large stack of Hot Stampers could now come more fully to life.
None of this, it seems, was thanks to the Isoacoustics GAIA I speaker isolation footers or their various sized isolation pucks. Every time we took them out from whatever they were sitting under, the sound got better. My opinion based on this experience is that these isolation footers are more mischief makers than sound quality helpers.
Which is not to say that Isoacoustics products don’t do anything. They change the sound for sure, but I don’t think that change is a desirable one. I would certainly never use them, and I would advise anyone who wants a great sounding system to avoid them.
It is possible, I will add, that Isoacoustics footers might be helpful in some systems. I can’t imagine what system that is, but I also can’t dismiss the possibility altogether. My worry is that, like in Bill and Andreea’s case, they would help and hurt at the same time, and that the hurt they cause would go undetected and undermine progress for audiophiles who truly strive for better sound.
The good news is that there are a lot of other audiophiles out there who don’t have a friend like me to demonstrate to them the problems Isoacoustics products and others like them cause, thus a lot of potential buyers for the resale market. So if you’ve followed the same path as Bill and Andreea and have a slew of Isoacoustics footers under anything and everything in your system, you’ve got quite a bit of stuff there that you might consider selling to buy some mischief-free stuff, such as the Townshend Seismic Isolation Platform.
And if after reading this story you remain convinced that Isoacoustics products are helping your system, consider this suggestion. Get yourself a Hot Stamper or two, and then try pulling those little mischief makers out and see what happens. You may be surprised by what you learn!