Hi Caterhaml, I am beginning to think that all these materials and what ever feet, spikes or whatever can tailor the sound much like ICs and speaker cable. Granite gives a harder sound than maple. MDF was bland and gave the bass a rubbery sound. Glass was similar to granite but not as presice or incisive but was not as hard sounding. I am still experimenting but I keep coming back to spikeing amps to the concrete floor and maple for CD and granite for the preamp. Then you have all the different sounds that pucks, cone, spikes, ballbearings or whatever make. I am beginning to get snow blind. With the different sounds these materials produce, I can't help think that it will be very system dependant. What do you think?
Footers/Shelf Material
I am still on the shelf quest, trying Corian, Neuance and Maple Butchers Block (the latter is still to arrive, but is coming). The Neuance is still the best - the Corian less dynamic, slower and a little warmer. But I have also been trying lots of footers with these shelves, hoping for a magical combination. And I found one.. With hard shelves like Corian, glass, perspex, marble etc (including the Neuance) - (but definitely not for MDF), the best I have found is the E-A-R Large Isolation Feet, $3.25 each at the Parts Connection. With hard shelves all of the cones I have tried are way too peaky. Plain old hard rubber feet are muddy and smeered. Vynil feet in general are "zingy" and tend to hardness from the middle of the mid-range on up, and a bit smeered on down - and this includes Vibrapods. The Vibrapods are a bit too lively in the upper mids and not great with string tone, but are also not coherent from top to bottom (but are otherwise second-best to the E-A-R feet. But the E-A-R feet give you all the detail of the best of the other footers (cones, squishy feet etc) with NO peakiness, and fantastic solidity to images. They are an unfortunate shade of blue and look like a hard synthetic rubber, but do not have any of the fuzz and smeer that you get with hard rubber footers. More neutral overall than anything else, all the detail as you get with cones but with none of the peakiness, none of the smeer you get with rubber, vynil, or sorbothane. I like them. There are also small feet at $1 each, but my components are too heavy for them and they sound muddy and grey - but they might work with light components - they are used by Sonic Frontiers on all their better gear. Please note I do NOT recommend them if you use MDF shelves.