So yesterday I purchased this 2.5 kg anti-vibration steel damper (Artesania) and placed it on the top of my tube amp. After a few hours of listening, I suddenly heard a hiss on the right channel twitter of the speaker and after a while the amp went out, blowing the fuse. This happened three times. After the second time, I noticed that one of the speaker cables’ spades was broken and replaced the speaker cables with others, but it happened again so I kind of excluded that as a reason of the issue. I’ve now moved interconnect cables into a different preamp input to check whether that could be the cause. Can anyone guess what happened? Many thanks. Franco
Yes, It’s a tube amp and you have been blocking the ventilation by placing a 2.5kg steel damper on top. So the amp is overheating and the fuse is blowing.
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Ansuz Acoustics from Denmark manufacture resonance control devices. Lars Christensen left Nordost the cable manufacturer and later founded Ansuz with Michael Børresen. Aavik electronics and Børresen speakers are sister brands. I’m new here and am excited to contribute to this beautiful community as a long time audiophile and music lover (pure consumer not affiliated with anyone). I first tried and kept the Ansuz feet a couple of years ago in my former Naim setup and was very pleased with the result - after going from four to three feet placed directly between case and rack (not Fraim). And I prefer to have one of the feet in the front and two in the back. Maybe because in the back there are the cables which mechanically ‘pull’ on the device or introduce vibrations.
Right now I am using their Titanium Rack plus three Darkz feet directly underneath each individual box. The Ansuz power distributor got its own Titanium rack shelf. The cables on the floor are supported by their cable lifters and I take care that all the individual cables behind the rack have some air around them. In total this is a very large investment into resonance control. One rack shelf with the extra feet in my setup buys you roughly a Bartók. This is purely to say that I was willing to part with significant hard earned funds for the result. Ah, and by the way, the columns are made from titanium. Beautiful material…
What the resonance control results in - it realises untapped potential in the boxes. And depending on what the mechanical setup is before an upgrade, that revealed potential can be quite stunning. At first, I had the feet / pucks the wrong way around in the titanium rack. They look very similar on both sides and have no obvious top or bottom. Just correcting that blunder made a difference I would not want to miss. I love to listen to music for hours on end. So the effect is not an “in your face, first five minutes excitement”, which wears off and ultimately gets on your nerves. It reveals more of the music - any music. It helps in opening up the music, so the consciousness can perceive the intent of the music more directly. Without thinking in between. Like ‘this is epic’ or ‘this feels abrasive’.
I am new here and it will take time for the community to find out whether my ears are any good. And I don’t know how Ansuz’ resonance control compares to - for example - Stillpoints. But I know I’m not the only one who has used feet costing as much as a box itself and are happy with their result. In my case that parity applies to a Stax and a Burson headphone amp. Apparently the mechanical vibration inside the boxes - even extremely minute vibration - makes a big difference. Probably hifi boxes are at a level of maturity, where these small mechanical differences matter significantly.
As for trying at home, I might get a sample box from Ansuz (dealer) and start by putting the best ones under the source and under the power distributor and listen. If there are a lot of existing pucks (Stillpoints for example) in the system, it might be better for evaluating the changes in sound by taking them out first.
As this might lead to a discussion - can’t be audible, hard to measure, no proper reasoning for causes provided - the following two cents worth. A complicated system like a hifi system with all the systems adjacent has known unknowns. One of the recurring known unknowns in hifi is the answer to the question ‘why is it audible for a group of people?’. Human mind and its consciousnesses are little understood in the West. Maybe an analogy is interesting. Doing scans of brains does not tell us the quality of a feeling. And it is reasonable to expect that scans of matter will never yield that result. Mind is other than body. It is dependent on body, but other. And in our everyday consciousness while listening to music or audio there are many things going on in the mind beyond the sound. Everyday mind consciousness forms an internal ‘image’ of what the ear consciousness presents. How that internal mind ‘image’ comes to be is very different between people. It can be changed over time through the practice of meditation. Another analogy - someone with little listening experience might fall for a placebo tweak or he / she might not be able to discern the difference at all. Or yet another analogy - mind consciousness could bring thoughts of associations to the sound to the fore. Those could be ‘like’ / ‘don’t like’ or maybe ‘ahh, I should listen to that band next’. Those mind ‘images’ arise and cease. They are called mental events. Someone who is trained in listening for the sound signature of music can discern things that can not be predicted within the boundaries of the complicated system itself that is called hifi.
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