Do stands make a difference for equipment?

I do not waste my money sticking it into doodads. I spent it on the basic equipment.
I guess if you have state of the art equipment, and want to glean the last possible bits out of it, yeah, spend thousands on feet, stands and such. Knock yourself out!
If you have to live within a budget, then save your pennies for basic equipment. and skip the fancy stands, $1,000 feet, etc.
Just my opinion. Feel free to do whatever you want. For a person asking.. I gave my advice.
Racks. footers.. etc ALL get stuck into the 'Spend only about 10% of you budget on stuff besides electronics and speakers".

So if you want to scrimp more on cables to buy fancy feet no problem. I spent $1.25 per foot to buy Butyl rubber chemical bottle stoppers, size 10, lots of them for my glass shelf (cheap) stand.
Works great.
Allowed me to spend MORE on what matters.. like electronics.
When your doodads cost as much as your basic electronic equipment, you are in lala land. Even spending 25% on doodads is insane. Naturally you are free to disagree.

I guess it depends on what particular products Elizabeth, some are more expensive than others.The Star Sound Audio Points I mentioned are quite reasonable in price yet yield very worthwhile improvement that`s more than subtle. Their Sistrum stands are more money but are`nt excessively so, and boy do they work! It`s all a matter of perspective. These well engineered products will expose the often 'hidden' potential in good quality components.Effectively addressing vibration is worth the effort.
Regards,

I went from heavy duty glass shelves to Copulare wooden shelves and it made a tremendous difference in the playback of my source components and the amps. The sound improved tremendously. I also upgraded to a heavy mass Clearaudio MontBlanc turntable stand from a standard wall mount one, and again, it was an improvement in sound.

Ivan, you bring up another important point regarding your Maher stands: electrical isolation. How is this implemented in that stand? I presume you mean some grounding scheme using leads, etc. I am a big fan of electrical grounding schemes, and rather than run leads from my equipment chassis, I actually incorporate my sistrum stand instead. This was suggested to my by Starsound. It theoretically creates a larger grounding plane from what I was told.

Elizabeth, your position is a little contrarian in light of what most of us spend over an audio lifetime. However, I do agree with the allocating money wisely and according to scale. A $250 CDP does not necessarily warrant megabuck stands, but there are many good options out there. In terms of performance, you would be shocked by what a good stand like a Sistrum sp101 can do under a relatively modest set of speakers. It becomes a whole new entity and it is not simply 7.5% better....

Elizabeth wrote a very good comment. Normally nothing can be added except you have such rattling units like Audioquest4life owns, then you'll run in a real problem, when a piece of wood (= Copulare, a German Brand) makes tremendous differences :-)
Investment in better brain (Design) is the way to go.