I cannot really disagree Dekay. Regardless of what you do there will be some vibration that gets through. The spectrum of this vibration may be sympathetic to one component and detrimental to the sound of another. This depends, I believe, on the natural resonance of the box used for the component and the internal methods of isolating boards etc. But I could be wrong, it may be that different brands of capacitors behave differently to different vibrations. But, I would add that vibration control is a mixture of minimising vibrations and making sure they are synergistic to your components. Therefore I don't see it as being a matter of only tuning the vibrations to a component - you may get a neutral result, but you will cause a lot of smearing of detail (I am not implying that that is your point Dekay, just setting up the extremes in order to make my point). I have always felt that there is a lot of validity to the light and rigid idea, but have never found the right shelf for the application. What I am saying is that if you use a light rigid welded steel rack (spiked up and down) and the Neuance shelf you will find you remove a lot of vibration and that you will also get a pretty neutral sound. To finally get this kind of result from the light/rigid concept makes the Neuance shelf a breakthrough product for me. From there you can tailor the sound to individual components by choice of footer and get a wide variety of results. But I have so far had excellent results with the rack/Neuance/E-A-R in three different systems. One has a carpeted suspended wooden floor, another has a carpeted concrete pad floor, and the other has a terracotta tiled floor. One has tubes/electrostatics, the other two have large mosfet amps driving conventional box speakers. One has a tube preamp, and the other two have solid state. Two have turntables and CD players, the other just CD player. One has a CD transport that has a soft internal suspension of the transport, the others are more conventionally mounted. Inside the boxes, some rubber mount the boards, some use more expensive elastomer... on it goes. In each case the reduction in peakiness, the reduction in smear and hence the increase in resolution has been impressive. In one case we were replacing bladders, in another we were replacing massively heavy sand-filled stands and in another were replacing light rigid stands with damped Corian shelves. In each case we found that whereas before there had been advantages to using Vibrapods or cones, that now they sounded gross and simple elastomer or rubber feet sounded best. I am not trying to win an argument here because I have no doubt that there are other ways that might sound better and maybe better shelves, and you may very well not like the sound of the light/rigid approach. But for me the sucessful execution of the light/rigid approach is the Holy Grail because I find the others (such as the bladder or massive approaches) can be successful in obtaining neutrality (and reduce peakiness), and can even do quite well in reducing smear, but they fail badly at being true to the rhythm and pace of the music. That is, they can make nice sounds but not engaging music. I am delighted to be getting both right now.
