Hello Sirs,
As posted earlier, I asked JongHyun from Hifistay to send his flagship footers, Absolute Point, to me and try here directly in my system. He's very kind and did send me one set with all the caps from standard stainless steel, bronze and pure coppers. As he had to give the rest to his dealers, so he will send me another set later when coming back to the UK from South Korea.
My first impression when opening the case is the footers are very well built, top class quality indeed. And as JongHyun requested, I tried the standard stainless steel caps first with all 4 footers went underneath my cd transport. Although he said it'd take 24-48h for the footers to settle down, but when I first listened to them I could immediately spot the differences. The sound becomes more relaxing, soundstage goes a bit deeper and wider but somehow less slam and dynamic as the tradeoff.
When I switched to the pure copper caps, my system has regained its dynamic and slam immediately while still make the sound very relaxing. It's just incredible that those stuff revealed things I had not spotted before in the same track that I'm very familiar with. With the new tweak, I can hear the melody of the very lowest notes being played softly and gently by the bass guitar alongside the powerful drums/kicks.
Everything is there within the recording in the first place but I don't know why those stuff had never caught my attention until I have the footers and caps underneath my digital boxes. Because it's really easy to be drawn into and overwhelmed by the drums as they are incredible so everything else becomes trivial or blurry.
I did have a goosebump when I listened to that track and recognised that, effortlessly and naturally, my system has gone up a notch by revealing something seem obvious with the help of those footers and pure copper caps. I can see that the sound becomes even warmer and more musical. In the lowest notes, bass was a bit deeper while letting them decay a bit longer, just a tiny bit but I can feel the changes. The staggering experience I had at that moment led me thought that I'd gone mad or my brain was heavily tweaked.
The impacts are more significant when I split the set of 4 into 2 to use underneath both my cdt and dac. However, it's really unstable for my heavy cdt when it was supported by only 2 footers, especially when the tray opened/closed, so for H&S I put all the 4 footers back under my transport.
Because of the very positive changes made in my system, I didn't bother to put the special bronze caps on. But JongHyun insisted that I should try them and I went ahead. Actually, the impacts brought about by the bronze caps stay between the stainless steel and pure coppers ones, that means they produce a very natural, relaxing but neutral sound. They are more dynamics and slam than the stainless steel but less warm and deep in bass compared to the copper caps. So my obvious choice is to put those copper caps back and enjoy the music.
Prior to this point, I had never tried to research about isolations and see what they can do to a hifi system, especially with scientifically understandable ways; nor ever tried isolations in my system although I'm using TOTL racks and platforms from a well known UK brand. But with what the Absolute Point footers from Hifistay are doing their magical tricks here, I'm not sure how things can be better when I receive another set from JongHyun to place them underneath my dac.
Enjoy the weekend everyone with beautiful music.
!
