It is great you asked Joe that. But I wonder if the answer would be different the other way around -- placing a CMS amp stand (with CMS filter shelf) on a Herzan. It might still be redundant but this way the techniques should, I think, be additive overall and not deleterious.
Hi Ron,
I hope you are well. What comes to my mind when I read these types of hypotheticals is the steps that we go through to reach our final product designs and the reasons we do what we do. Math is math and math is critical to design work. But once the math is done, and I am only speaking for myself, the larger question of the intended application becomes much more important. So, what we do is use math to start the process and human hearing to finish it.
We design our products exclusively for high end audio. So, I build what I think is the best product design based on the math and then we sit down and listen to what affect the initial design has on the components that are resting on them. It is a guarantee that something in the sound field will change. Sometimes the results are not very good.
It has been the case that the atomic constituents of a new experimental metal we were interested in were inconsistent with the type of energy transfer we needed in a particular bandwidth and the components produced a signal that was not good at all. You could hear that the sound degraded. Or a new damping material did too much in one bandwidth and not enough in others. Honestly, I have never, not even once, been satisfied with the results of an initial CMS design.
Anyway, this is a complicated way of saying that the damping materials in our products go through a process of addition and subtraction in thousands of an inch until we think we get all of the frequencies balanced correctly as measured by what we hear coming out of the loudspeakers. Then we test the design in a bunch of other systems and rooms to validate the results.
All of this is to say that we try to design our products to be "right" when they stand alone. Could there be an improvement by placing another device on ours? Sure. Could there be a degradation by doing the same? Sure. Could the same be true in the reverse? Sure.
What concerns me is that much of this is unpredictable because "everything does something". This is true all the way down to the atomic structure of the materials used in the device. With this in mind, I would suggest that people be cautious about making a major investment to try it. But, if you do, let the systems play music for at least a week before you make an A/B judgement. It takes a very long time (quite often) for complex components to fully settle in.
I hope this helps, and let me finish by saying that I am not offering any judgement whatsoever about the effectiveness of one products over another product. If anything I wrote seems that way, I apologize.