Footers- Break In? Such A Change.

The Center Stage 2m footers are extremely impressive. I’ve been through many footers: Nordost Sort Kones, Stillpoints and several other top footers. I previously used the Stillpoints, but read about these 2M footers (in TAS) and decided to get a set.

At this point, with the experience I’m having with them in the system, I’d rather keep my current electronics and just get two or three sets of footers. The substitution of better electronics would not, I fear, bring the music to Life in this way. Apparently, removing all vibration can yield some staggeringly great results. I can’t even imagine that if I went back to Jadis or VAC electronics that this same result could be achieved. One need look no further than playing a good recording of a particular singer, and be awestruck by how the voice sounds vastly more the way it does in life. I’d just played a Cleo Laine CD which was nearby, and in this, her return to Carnegie Hall (the album is 1975), her voice is quite lifelike in the way it "moves."

It’s too bad they’re so expensive. If they were only $700 instead of $1100, it still wouldn’t be an insubstantial purchase, but it would certainly allow a (slightly) wider set of people to hear what their electronics are truly capable of. And there would be substantially more benefit than one could get even by spending $5,000. Superb isolation has no substitutes. I would have been happy with the Stillpoints had I not heard about these babies and then tried them out (I like places with 60-day returns. It allows time to live with a component). And, having lived with them for a month? No way I could go back to anything less now. Except for (eventually) getting a new integrated and a pair of Magnepans 2.7i, I’m real good.

Try these little suckers out, but you must give them the full 10 days of putting some component on them and then not touching them or the component again. You cannot move them, even an inch or two, for at least the next 10 days. Fourteen would be better. Just put them under a component (any digital or even your line conditioner would be the best place to start), listen at the 1 day, 3 day, 7 day and 10 day mark. 10 is where it gets magical.  Oh, and you will not like how they sound at the beginning. You might even think something's wrong with your system. It's not. These things will make you wonder while they're going through whatever settling they do, though. So, expect it.

@chayro

What you are talking about seems to be more akin to someone not assessing the improvements correctly. That is most assuredly not the case with the Center Stages. Their advance over most other footers is obvious after the 10 days. I suppose, as someone who has had Audio Research, Goldmund Jadis and other expensive components, that take weeks to pass their break-in point (in the ’80s, it would take continuous playing for weeks before the most exalted components showed their virtues), 10 days is not a long time to wait for a component to break in.

They remove a "step-ladder" type effect - and particularly in digital - that allows voices to sound vastly more organic and the mechanism (control of the throat, chest and diaphragm) the singer uses to achieve an effect (i.e., "bending a note") becomes vastly more obvious. And the use of the word "vastly" is not - in this case- hyperbole.

This is more akin to having a decent (but not great) amplifier, and then getting an amplifier that reproduces sound in a far more closer-to-live-than-before effect. One that reproduces musical improvements, such as hearing if a passage is played staccato instead of how it sounded before: portato (which would have been wrong), but the "noise" that covers up the spaces between the notes is quite a bit more present in lesser equipment. In fact, even some very, very good equipment is not great at distinguishing between staccato and portato effects.

As well, instruments have more "texture," so when a trombone plays, you clearly hear the "blatty" sound it makes. Or xylophones, where you can hear the actual physical properties of the xylophone, instead of just hearing "notes" that help you fill in the blanks - as it were -  that allow you to  identify that it is an xylophone, but that you could only do by  focusing to come to this conclusion, whereas, with the Center Stage 2ms, it is immediately obvious. It’s much more like it is in a symphony hall performance and I hear those quite regularly.

You would just have to hear them yourself to understand how far ahead they are of any of the Stillpoints (and I’ve had Ultra Minis, Ultra 5s, both generations). The sonics are just not comparable. But it is hard to describe some effects in print. Sometimes nothing will do except the live experience.