On a practical note, the flat nose that the Harmonie sits on is only 1cm in diameter. While it works perfectly on hard floors, don’t think that it won’t work on carpet. It’s a small enough area to compress carpet effectively, if not instantly, especially given that in most cases, the rack will be supporting a serious weight of electronics. It might take time to settle, but it will achieve stasis, allowing you to level the rack easily. Which brings me to another aspect of the Harmonie, which makes it peculiarly efficient when it comes to its use with racks. A lot of systems either stand in corners or use two racks placed next to each other. In either case, there’s always a spike or footer that’s incredibly hard to access and adjust easily. The large diameter of the Harmonie makes it easy to adjust precisely by hand, even when barely accessible. If you use lock-nuts, they are also easier to tighten, given that you can hold the footer in place and prevent it moving.
Mentioning lock nuts brings us back to the issue raised when using the Harmonie with speakers. The supplied M10 adaptor threads are relatively short. You might not need a huge amount of thread on most racks, certainly less than on speakers, but if you lose half of that thread to a lock-nut things get pretty marginal pretty quickly. I’d really like to see the Harmonie supplied with longer threads, even if only as a cost option. Of course, if your rack uses M8 threads (and many do) then getting longer threads is just a case of looking on Ebay. Otherwise there’s little to criticise here and a whole lot to like.
As good as the Harmonie is when it is used on speakers (and it is really good) it’s even better and more cost effective applied to equipment racks. Not only do you need half the number, but you are spreading the cost/benefit across everything supported in the rack. Experiments with shifting individual pieces on and off of the Harmonie-equipped PRS demonstrated that, while the D1.5 CD/SACD transport scored the biggest musical improvement, the benefits were just as obvious on the C1.2 DAC, the T1 clock, the L1 line-stage the VTL TL-5.5 or the Wadia S7i, all of which were added to the basic set up to see how they fared, the side by side set-up making quick comparisons a piece of cake. With the system – whatever the system – supported on the Harmonie footers, the music took on a natural clarity, presence, life and texture, a more relaxed, communicative and fluid presentation. Once heard, it’s an improvement you’ll not want to do without. The best thing about having eight Harmony footers left over from reviewing them under speakers? Being able to fit them to both of the PRS racks!
Price and availability:
Harmonie Footer (M6 or M8) – €110 ea. Available in sets of 3 to 8 pieces
Harmonie Footer (M10) – €114 ea.
Manufacturer
SEVEN AUDIO
7 rue Joseph Bonnet
33100 BORDEAUX
France
Tel. 33 5 56 40 19 50
Net. www.neodio.fr
