How does the settling in process effect affect your footers/vibration devices recently talked about?
The "settling process" I refer to is an equilibration or accommodation that has to take place with respect to vibrational energy. All things vibrate. As we know, the sounds we hear are a direct consequence of vibrational energy. Also, the first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed or transferred and so an "anti-vibration" footer underneath a component is incapable of removing vibrations, only transforming them to some other form that hopefully results in a more pleasing sound.
Those of you who have played around with footers or foundations know that if you place a speaker or a component on a wood plinth, you are likely to get a softer but fuller and more rounded sound and cherry will subtly sound different from walnut. Place that same device on top of a stainless steel Stillpoint and the sound gets leaner, brighter and with sharper focus and attack. This concept of vibrational grounding, to shape your sound signature is certainly not new but this type of grounding is at play in ways that some audiophiles are not even aware of.
It turns out all things have a specific fundamental resonant frequency. Your listening room will have several and it's why certain frequencies can sound accentuated in certain rooms. Spinning Earth also has a prominent resonant frequency of 7.83 Hz that is called the Schumann resonance. Some have referred to it as the heartbeat of Earth and some creative minds have used this as a target with the idea that shifting your room's or your component's resonant frequency to align with the Earth's fundamental resonance of 7.83 Hz will somehow make your audio playback sound more organic, natural, and less fatiguing. This is the premise behind the popular grounding boxes made by companies like Entreq and Synergistic Research.
With Entreq, which is a passive device, you connect your component via a ground cable to some box that basically contains a proprietary mix of "earth" (i.e. natural minerals). Essentially, the vibrational energy of your component is being transferred to some other mass and as you might imagine, the bigger the box of earth, the greater the influence. If you're going to go for maximum influence, just stick a dedicated ground rod into your backyard and ground all of your components to it since there is no greater mass than mother Earth. If you talk to your electrician or electrical engineer about having a dedicated ground rod installed for your audio setup, they will think you're crazy since the purpose of electrical grounding is supposed to be to create a safety path for fault currents and not for SQ but anyone that looks at it this way is completely missing the point. Also, soil composition will impact sound and sandy soil will sound different from volcanic soil which is why Entreq and other creatives devise their own proprietary mix of minerals that include such things as copper, silver, and tungsten.
The alternative route is to use an active ground box made by companies like Synergistic Research, Telos, and others. In this situation, you connect your component via a ground cable to an electronic device that actively generates a vibrational frequency often based off of the Schumman resonance frequency of 7.83 Hz. It's quite novel if you think about it and they can create variants of this frequency for those who want a different different sound signature and this is what Synergistic Research does with their more expensive models.
Now back to your question of "settling in" with respect to footers and other vibrational devices (but this also relates to QSAL tech). To be able to shift the resonant frequency of your component to some other resonant frequency, whether it be the Schumann resonance or something else, it will always take time and that amount of time will be dictated by the mechanism of shift. Some footers convert certain vibrational frequencies to heat and some transfer them to mass just like the Entreq grounding boxes. Those that convert to heat, like a Stillpoint, the effect is much more immediate but with Center Stage footers made by Critical Mass (which I use), which transfer to mass, the settling time is a true roller coaster ride that can take a week. There are moments when your system actually sounds much worse where you are tempted to pull them out because you're convinced something has gone wrong. This is how I believe our technology works and why mass matters.
This begs the question why our tech is so effective. Unlike a footer, which acts more at the chassis level of a component, we are impacting resonances at the very deepest levels, at the level of the PCB and everywhere current flows but also where it doesn't. People often wonder why an audiophile fuse can make such a difference with SQ. You only have to look at the beeswax fuses made by Audio Magic to understand they exert their effect by altering electrical resonant energy. If we apply treatment to the ground pin of a tiny Chord Mojo, there will be noticeable impact but because the conductor mass of the chassis is small, the impact is smaller. If we apply treatment to the same ground pin of a giant DAC housed in a 50 lb chassis, provided ground is tied to that giant chassis, the impact of our treatment will be expectedly larger. It's why the impact of a 0000 AWG Ultimatum speaker cable is so huge. The more our tech is in your system, the more effective it serves as a sump for less desirable vibrational energy but this equilibrium shift takes time.
