Using the Neodio Harmonie footer under racks…
By Roy Gregory
In writing about the excellent results achieved with the Neodio Harmonie Footer under speakers, I speculated that it might work even better under racks. The reasoning behind the supposition is simple: the Harmonie has a flat base (as opposed to a pointed contact). The requirement to adjust speaker attitude means that loudspeaker cabinets are rarely set level, compromising the Harmonie’s contact area: racks on the other hand, should be set exactly level, which should maximise the Neodio footer’s sonic benefits. Throw in the fact that used on a rack those benefits potentially extend to more than just one box and you can see why the idea would be attractive… Too attractive to ignore.
Of course, you need a suitable rack to fit the Harmonies – and I have just the thing. The Blue Horizon Professional Rack System (or PRS) is a classic, modular design based around threaded uprights that screw together, clamping shelves between them. It’s a basic structure that’s been used by everyone from Quadraspire to SolidSteel, but the devil is, as always, in the details and variations on the theme are legion. The PRS ticks a couple of what are, in my experience, important boxes. It uses solid stainless steel uprights with integral threads (rather than threaded studding inserted into their ends) and it uses laminated bamboo shelves, a material that takes a lot of beating in performance terms, unless you are going to get seriously exotic/expensive. Normally it employs solid stainless-steel cones with 10mm threaded posts and lock nuts to facilitate levelling and mechanical grounding. All of which makes it an ideal test bed for the Harmonie. With a set of 10mm adaptors on order, I built two identical racks from my available kit of parts, each consisting of a four-shelf ‘stack’, supported on an independent isolation layer or sub-table. One was fitted with the standard cones beneath both rack and isolation layer, the other with Harmonie footers in the same locations.
With both layers of both racks carefully levelled, I set about installing a simple CD and integrated amp system, placed backwards in the standard PRS rack, so that it could be slid out and moved sideways into the Harmonie equipped version. Having said that, using the CH Precision D1.5 and the Levinson 585 means that the transition needs to be as easy as possible! Even so, it wasn’t without its challenges. The top-caps on the PRS are dimpled to accept the tips of the cones on the layer above, positively locating the rack on the sub-table. The Harmonie’s flat base is way too broad to engage with the dimple, so sliding something as heavy as the 585 into the rack risked nudging the whole upper section sideways off of the sub-table’s supporting caps. It proved possible, albeit requiring some considerable care. However, the results were more than worthwhile.
Reviewing the Harmonies under the Living Voice OBX-RW4 loudspeakers, I wrote, “The Neodio feet delivered more scale, more weight, considerably more texture, a more developed acoustic but most impressive of all was their impact on the music’s sense of rhythm and flow.” It’s a set of benefits that apply even more powerfully to their use with the PRS rack. With the Levinson’s output terminals connected to the astonishing little Vienna Acoustics Haydn stand-mounts, the increase in separation, dimensionality, depth and acoustic coherence was little short of remarkable. Yet that palpable sense of acoustic space, so rare from such a small speaker, seemed almost musically trivial when compared to the increase in temporal clarity and space. The placement and spacing of notes, the pace of a piece and changes to that pace became more natural and far more ‘legible’: not just that the musicians have set a particular tempo, or opted to change it, but how and why they’ve done so.
