Stillpoint Ultras anyone?

Tbg:
Using my wife's name to respond, but it's me: gbmcleod
I haven't placed speaker cables on the floor in many, many years, not since Enid Lumley said not to (circa 1990). Nor power cords. I've found that precise setup - which includes the room first, the electrical power second, and keeping cords anAd cables off the floor and isolation devices all third, set the stage for everything else to reveal itself. Leaving any one of those three out will dull the results and skew the actual performance of the products in the (usually) wrong direction.
The room is always the first thing I find most poorly addressed. Until the room is out of the equation, a person is wasting money on the wrong things. Of course, if you have a really large room, the room becomes less of an issue, although not a NON-issue.
All those things addressed, I'm sure you're correct. And I agree that
"seldom having the isolation devices in each of the four corners of a component is the best location for them." I'd never found that to be the way to do it. I usually slide the isolation devices all around a location (time-consuming to be sure, but I was the Equipment Manager for Fi Magazine before Harley was, so I do have some expertise in this) to find a "good" position, or I should say the improvement is "good enough." I then move to a second isolation device, slide that around and then to the third. After all 3 are in "good enough" positions (meaning the improvement in a soprano's vocal cords are pretty clear, especially trills), I then go back to the first foot and see if I can improve the clarity (and the transparency). Repeat ad nauseum.
I have no doubt that manufacturer's filters affect the sound, but if they can be turned off, i turn them off when I first get a product, so I can hear it "bare." I use the same logic listening to amps/preamps. First, I listen with the stock cord, and only then do I put in the audiophile-grade cord. It takes much longer, but a person can get a much better system with less money by investing 1), curiosity and 2), time. As Einstein once said, we should never lose our sense of curiosity and awe of 'the mysterious.' I think the same can be said for audio: magic happens much less expensively than most people know: they just don't have the curiosity of "I wonder what happens if I put this...here!!"
NOT investing time costs you a lot more money than investing the time in experimenting.

Gbmcleod, I guess there must be an interesting story behind your using your wife's name in posting.

I agree totally about keeping the cables off the floor. This is one area where reviewing gets to be a pain. I often end up with a snake's nest of pcs, ics, etc. behind my rack despite perhaps cleaning up everything maybe three times a year.

I was unaware of Einstein's remark, but will always remember a EE professor telling me that Ohm's law and a few others "totally" covered what happened in a circuit. Having been a grader in a physics course, I responded that I didn't think that was true. The look on his face convinced me that EE wasn't going to be a major I could tolerate.

On your room remarks, I would urge you to try Zilplex resonators. I have a big room in Texas and a very small room in New Mexico and both benefitted greatly from these guys placed where Zilplex says to place them. I have tried perhaps twenty other devices ranging from reflective mirror and absorbers to tubes, Tibetan bowls, digital equalization, etc. The Zilplexes are clearly the best at least in my two rooms. Obviously trial and error is our only way to assess the influence of anything, other than perhaps hosing down our system. : )

TBG:
I suppose it is interesting, as an example of the capriciousness of this site's login issues.
The site kept telling me I had the wrong username and password - this, AFTER I had signed in to "My Page." I deleted cookies, closed down the computer, brought it up, and the site STILL gave me the exact same message. Fortunately, the first time it did that I copied and pasted my post into the "TextEdit" on my Macbook.
I'd like to try the Ziplexes. Who sells them?

By the way, my 2 meter Nordost Frey 2 arrived at my dealer's today. Installed them (in place of the 1 meter pair, since I needed longer lengths to go from preamp to amps. Longest pair of Nordost I've ever bought. $$$!!!) They actually sound quite good out of the box, unlike earlier models. Highly musical. And tomorrow, the Nola Contenders arrive! My cup runneth over, not to mention my electronics repair person informed me that the Hurricane amp was repaired and ready for pickup (I love my Hurricanes: their realism is astounding, regardless of their not being "tops" in the resolution sweepstakes). But back to the Stillpoints.
I'm completely thrilled with the Minis. I expected them to be great - but they are closer to "fantastic". Astonishingly so. Were I to have a state of the art system - or something close to it, or even if I upgrade further - I'll try the next Stillpoint models. For now, this is splendid!

I must say, there must be a reason the Stillpoints don't work under some devices.I wonder if there is some material in the device that prevents them (the Stillpoints) from demonstrating their magic. Must be some powerful voodoo in those other components hexing the Stillpoints. It is not, after all, an electrical interface. It is a vibational one. Unless all vibration is gone, this is a mystery to me. The closest I can come to the proverbial "curse" on a component/tweak not working is when I had the Black Diamond Racing Rack sitting on my Finite Elemente Spider Rack and put footers under an NAD C326BEE. The sound was grainy, like 800-speed film and NO dimensionality (not an inherent trait of the NAD BEE series amps). I couldn't fathom it. Eventually, I took out the Black Diamond Rack and put the NAD directly on the rubber pucks. VOILA! It sounded like the NAD. When I spoke to someone knowledgable about it, they posited that the Black Diamond, the Spider Rack and the footers I was using were "fighting" each other. It made sense, since the removal of the footers and the BDR Rack caused the NAD to sigh in relief, "That Fool. What the hell was he doing?!?!?! Putting competing technologies all together like that and not even testing it one technology at a time."
I never did that again. If I want a hard shelf on the Spiders, I just use maple board instead of MDF, and THEN put the component on that, as I did today. THEN, after listening to a few cuts, I inserted the Stillpoints. OH, BABY, give it TO me!!! LOL. It sounds great. I wandered in and out of the music room at several points during the evening tonight, thinking (delusionally) that the Frey had magically gone thru a time warp and broken in, but MAN, even un-broken in, it sounds as dynamic as hell, with instruments within sections jumping out towards you. Not a "reserved" sound in the least! It's like standing in front of a tiger's cage at the zoo: the tiger looks at you for a bit, not blinking, then quite suddenly rises to his feet, walks toward the edge of the cage...and before you can react, growls and simultaneously swipes at you thru the bars. Of course, you're too far back, but you still blink - if not let out a gasp and jump backwards, caught off guard by the suddenness of the tiger's lunge.
This would be, in audio terms, of the same speed with which the Stillpoints allow the (sudden) release of the dynamic inflections, as well as the dynamic outbusts, contained within a recording.

Tbg:
If you read Gregory's review on The Audio Beat website, he clearly states one must place the isolation devices directly into contact with the component and he states that removing it in any way from direct contact with the component has deleterious effects. Perhaps that accounts for your experience. I couldn't say myself. Just a speculation.