I've had a pretty good amount of experience with a lot of different isolation approaches and products, and I do have to say that overall, in general, the Mapleshade stuff absolutely does what it claims and does it very well. However, I've never had a piece of gear that was truly susceptible to airborne or external vibrations, and in that case, I do believe Dan is right with the isolation approach. The mapleshade approach is based on a whole different take on the problem -- that the internal vibrations in a piece of gear need to be drained out of the piece and into something that have naturally pleasing resonances -- even as minute as they may be, which is why the massive feet and boards. Of course all of this works much better if you have a solid, massive, and extremely rigid rack to begin with. So, take an amp like the s.e.x. which seems very immune to outside vibrations, but still has a power transformer which will be the source of most of the vibrations this amp will experience. In this case it is probably advantageous to use the heavy brass feet either directly into a very rigid rack, or into one of heir thick maple boards, which is then in turn isolated from the rack with some sort of compliant substance.
I recently took the set of mapleshade brass micropoint feet I bought for my dac and placed them under a inexpensive but decent CD player in the other system, which is on a mapleshade rack, and the change was not subtle at all. It took this $700 player and made it sound more like a $3500 player using it's internal dac, but when used as a transport, the improvement was even better.
So, it's hard to say which approach will work best in any given situation, but the one thing I can say with confidence is that the mapleshade system has never made anything sound worse -- maybe sometimes there is little to no improvement, but unlike a zillion other products -- some cheap, some insanely expensive it was a real crapshoot as to whether or not the sound would be made worse, and unfortunataly, it often was.
I don't say this lightly beecause everybody's situation is different and I was totally and completely skeptical about the mapleshade stuff at first but a lot of experience (this is the 3rd rack of theirs I've owned, not to mention a whole lot of their other products) I simply cannot think that they are onto something.
P.S. -- I wish I could use their cables, but my cat is way to attracted to them and with their micro thin dielectrics, a cat can easily runin the cables with one bite. Don't ask me how I know :-).
So, the stuff isn't cheap, it's expensive to ship, but if you are willing to try it, you may find it pretty good for your overall sonics. I have and will continue to do so where it makes sense. And no, I'm not on their payroll and have zero to gain from relating all this, just that maybe someday some of you guys may try this stuff and be as pleasantly surprised as I was.
