Mike (Lavgine),
Could you compare the A10-U8's to other products you may have used in the past? pods, spikes, damping plates, cones, etc? Thanks for any guidance...i am always up for a trial...but at 700 per quad, it is worth doing some homework first! i am confident they are amazing products by the sheer number of experienced audiophiles who have said nothing but good things about them...but your specific notes would be appreciated. thanks!
sorry for the delay in response; i had a friend over late for a listening session last night.
i've been somewhat of a tweaker for most of my 17+ years as a serious audiophile. i have sold off some of the various products i've acquired over the years, but i still have a cabinet full of various tweaks. i view anything not a piece of electronics, or a speaker, or a cable......as a tweak. but even though i'm a tweaker, my audio/music loving culture is based on a system having 'good bones'. you cannot tweak yourself to happiness. if you have a bunch of colored components, whether too smooth and golden, or too clinical and sterile, then you are always going to be fighting color, balancing instead of improving performance.....and you cannot win. gear must be essentially neutral and natural of itself. then you can mate it with other gear with that characteristic and it works. so the main focus for me is to get the right 'bones'. you have to deal correctly with the foundation first.
which is why i built a dedicated room; i tried to tweak a conventional room and ultimately it became the limitation. it's why i installed the Equi=tech isolation transformer, because trying to fix dirty power at the gear becomes a trade-off.
i'll try to describe my history of mechanical tweaks. i've found that every piece of gear can be somewhat improved by optimizing the impedence between the gear and the rack/floor/place it sits upon. sometimes just a little and sometimes alot.
so all that said, 5 years ago i purchased the Grand Prix Audio Monaco racks with the Formula shelves to get away from mechanical isolation tweaks. the Grand Prix used a de-coupling frame, de-coupling Apex footers, and tunable shelves for individual pieces of electronics. tuning was from choosing the correct compliance sorbothane disc for the weight of each component. you might even use one value on one corner and a different value in the other corners. you could tune the shelf to optimize any piece of gear. wonderful. and it worked. you did need to use new discs once every year as they would compress and lose their compliance over time. i was able to use the Grand Prix 'naked'.....without any additional tweaks.
up until the GPA rack i used numerous different mechanical tweaks.......all kinds of spikes, wood blocks, numerous different footers including Black Diamond Racing shelves and spikes, shelves such as the Svelt Shelf, i've had Stillpoints under 4 different turntables, aurios of various types and others. i also tried a Halcyonics active isolation shelf, and i still have a magnetic levitation shelf i use under my music server upstairs.
which brings us to the Wave Kinetics A10-U8's. as far as isolation for gear; they are the best thing i have found which is able to be optimized for any type of gear. they can be moved around easily. i've only found one situation where they offered too much isolation. and they exceeded what the Grand Prix did clearly. and when i moved them to my Adona rack; i've had at least equal performance, likely just a little better.
technology marches on. the same guy who did the science on the NVS turntable, designed the A10-U8's.
