As promised my thoughts on my newly installed Townsend Podium isolation system.
As promised I received and installed my Podiums a couple of days ago. Thank you to Millercarbon and Ozzy for their encouragement as it wasn't so difficult to get my 200 pound speakers up on them after all. I just moved slowly and used towels to protect everything.
I'm going to install my platforms in stages so this is just the Podiums so far. Also, I'm coming off of IsoAcoustics GAIA Is and the speakers are Wilson Sasha 2s. I have nothing but positives to say about advantages of the GAIAs over spikes, especially their form factor and ease of use as opposed to spikes. That said at twice the price the Townsend Podiums need to be better. They are!
Please forgive me in advance for my sometimes corny descriptions...I'm not a professional writer or reviewer!
My most intense overall thought with the Podiums is how I am now able to track all the different melodies/instruments and vocals as distinct and separate rather than presented as a mass melody. For example on Mark Knopfler's 5:15AM his guitar just floats along distinctly embedded in the band, but clear to me in a way like never before. Other observations are as follows:
-Bass notes sound like instruments not just a lower register sound.
-Image is more precise laterally, vocals are in a specific place, and not always centered.
-increased clarity/focus is across the entire frequency range. That said, the upper midrange/female vocals are clearly more distinct/discreet.
-I'm a more relaxed listener, probably less sibilance. (This is the first few hours so this might just be listener bias).
-Goo Goo Dolls, Iris, lead singer has his own space and melody line, the rest of the band is clearly accompanying him...not a mass of sound.
-Start and stop is more dramatic and note decay is longer against a quieter background. Along these lines I also notice a pace or timing improvement too. In the Shape of a Heart, solo vol. 2, Jackson Browne, the gaps are silent except for a little quiet whine of probably a string I never heard before in the "silence".
-As far as a form factor, sometimes I think they look really cool and industrial, other times they look a bit much, and make my speaker look like a black octopus. That's a nit pick, whatever!
In terms of value at $2600 they are the best accessory value I have ever made. Neil Gader in his TAS review said something like they were an essential upgrade. I didn't understand that then, but I do now. I recently bought two pairs of interconnects(retail $8500). These were upgrades over a couple of very good $600 cables I picked through a shootout. The cable upgrade was clearly an improvement, but not of a scale of these Podiums, and certainly a dear price to have paid. The Podiums are a steal of an improvement in my system.
When I started looking at this technology it went against everything I thought I knew about vibration and resonance control. The concepts behind the Townsend isolation systems are not hard to understand, but they were hard for me to believe. I'm a believer now! Highly recommended. I will let you know how the Platforms turn out this weekend. They are going one each under my two box ARC REF 10 preamp and one under my dCS Bartok streamer. As always, thanks to those of you helping me to learn more about this hobby!
