Thanks for starting this thread, @Lou_Ford!
I’ll kick things off with what I’ve found effective (often wishing I didn’t):
- Isoacoustics Zazen I Isolation Stand - I got this just for kicks to put under my Dave to see if I’d notice a difference. Welp. I did. Was it world changing? No. But there was just a bit more smoothness and ease of flow to the music - and a slightly blacker background. Having had this experience, I moved on to the rest of my components…
- Isoacoustics pucks - I have them under everything, except the DAVE. Specifically, the Orea graphites for small stuff (server, scaler, DDC), and Orea Indigo for bigger stuff (tube amp and PowerPlant). Same improvements as for the DAVE, but just more. Smoother, easier flow to the music, and a blacker background.
- Sorbothane Isolation Disks - These are a no-brainer, given the price. I bought four to place under my entire rack from IsolateIt. Result? You guessed it - just a bit more of the above, which shouldn’t be a shocker. If I could go back again, I’d probably start here, actually and slowly get pucks for everything else over time. At least this starts by decoupling your entire rack (to a degree, of course) from the rest of the world. I live in NYC, where there are subways, traffic, other residents, and tons of other stuff to shake things imperceptibly.
- Tube Dampers - I was so ready for these to be snake oil. They just stink of it, right? But, I try to keep an open mind, and these weren’t too expensive to just try “just in case”. Well, you can’t have them. They’re staying. I think I would actually rank these over the other isolation products in the list. The music out of my tube amp was noticeably more focused and it cleaned up a bit of reverb (that I didn’t know was there). However, an interesting experience I had was that, specifically for my power tubes (2A3’s), having one damper actually added some noise - maybe it was picking up some vibration and was the right pressure to actually resonate with it - but adding a second damper to the single tube resulted in dead silence (so 2 dampers less noise than no dampers, less noise than 1 damper). I’m sure this is very case-by-case, but just thought I’d throw it out there in case anyone else runs into this.
Jury still out:
- Cable Lifters - I haven’t done any careful A/B listening here, and I also have only one power cable in my headphone rack that uses it. I do have cable lifters for my 2 channel setup, but again, I haven’t really done on/off critical listening, and my 2 channel system isn’t nearly as resolving as my headphone setup. To be clear, for the products in the prior section, I didn’t need careful A/B-ing. The improvements was obvious enough. Not so for cable lifters. I figure, worst case they’re keeping my nice cables off the floor. Best case, they marginally improve the sound. These are definitely not a big deal in either system, though.