will
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Palomino, From the sound you explain, it seems your room and gear are performing well above average, and in ways that are quite satisfying to you.
Beware of making the computer playback too good!
From your cocktail table explanation, my guess is that you are experiencing notable vibration from it, the metal and glass in particular. I have not used glass, but tile is pretty deadly. Being hard, it can sound pretty interesting and clear, but it sets up its own resonance that is far from even in frequency range and does the bad stuff to electronics. Idon't know, but suspect glass would be similar, and a pretty serious influence. So it does not surprise me that the foam gave a more complete sound stage. After playing with a lot of different materials for feet, I found most did something wrong to the balance. Finally I figured I needed a baseline to work from that was neutral. This is why I went for isocups, more complete shelf isolation, and fat dots under the the feet of the old teak cabinet I use. I am thinking of getting some thick hard maple for my gear shelves to drive it all home.
It will be interesting to hear what Steve H suggests. He has spent a lot of time experimenting!
It may or may not be the best bang for the buck, but I would guess your weakest link is resonance and vibrations from your rack. And this is truly baseline stuff, that I highly suspect you will one day want to resolve.
I wonder....If your cocktail table is ideal otherwise, and the legs and rails are stable and sturdy, it could be interesting to make nice neutral gear shelves for it that do not touch the metal frame on the sides, and floated on pieces of soundcoat, grungbuster, or the like. And maybe put several layers of soundcoat under the legs. Then, if you wanted to go further, you could, using the shelves for a more refined rack if needed, and perhaps more intense stuff to drain and protect the legs.
Then maybe three isocups under the Rachel, some cork or soundcoat cut round to fit onto the MINI base, Soundcoat or grundbuster pieces making a tripod under your drive, and maybe that itty bitty DAC too..not sure there! Altogether, I bet something like this would give you a pretty stable system to go from.
I just did a bunch of variations on the Mini feet. I put soundcoat on the wide part of the BDR cones and a large round piece that fits the round plastic base of the Mini. I ended up with the foot cone points up and about an inch into the diameter of the newly soundcoated base, and with grungbuster under the cones. With the weight on top, the cones are pressing into the soundcoat/plastic base, making a better connection to the aluminum body. Smoother, a wee touch warmer, and cleaner sounding than what I had. This was the best but variations were subtle which made me think that saving 60 on the feet, and just the soundcoat base and weight might work pretty well...especially with three 1/2 inch pieces of grungbuster "footing" for more damping, and creating more tension base to metal.
Raven,
PureMusic and Audirvana do the memory music Buffer/play thing that seem like what you found in Foobar. I put PureMusic in a RAMdisk, and left the memory play on, so the songs are played from memory, and the program is working from memory. I wonder if you checked Foobar that way...using both the buffer and the RAMdisk?
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