Critical Mass Systems’ Joe Lavrencik has been designing and fabricating various types of vibration-control devices for many years now. (I can remember hearing his first stand-alone boxes almost two decades ago.) He is a serious inventor, and each new generation of his products has been more effective than the last, culminating in the massive, handsome-looking, and pricey Olympus and MAXXUM stands and platforms, which do precisely what they’re intended to do—kill the effects of airborne, floorborne, and self-generated vibration via constrained-layer damping without any major sonic trade-offs.
This has not always been the case with Joe’s gear—and with vibration-control systems in general. His initial CMS offerings, for instance, lowered background noise and smoothed out jittery frequency response quite effectively, but they also took a toll in dynamic life, rather in the same way that plugging power amplifiers into older-gen power conditioners killed dynamics. Similar compromises affected Joe’s smaller devices, particularly his cylindrical CenterStage audio feet, which replace factory-installed footers beneath electronic components.
Though intended to do precisely the same job that CMS’ latest platforms and stands do so successfully—reduce vibration-induced noises via constrained-layer damping—to my ear the first-gen CenterStages didn’t really do much of anything, save slightly deaden the sound. While other folks heard their effect more positively, I ended up thinking there wasn’t enough “there” there to justify the CenterStages’ not-insubstantial cost.
As he did with his equipment stands, Joe kept tinkering, and his later-gen CenterStage2, introduced several years ago, was, indeed, more effective, audibly smoothing out frequency response and slightly enriching timbre with less of a price in liveliness. Though I liked CenterStage2’s a good deal better than Joe’s earlier versions, I still didn’t like their effects well enough to keep sets of them in place under my electronics.
Comes now an even-newer generation of CenterStage footer, the CenterStage2M, and though I don’t really know what has changed in its design and construction (in a note to me, Joe’s explanation of what he’d done was rather too highfalutin and non-specific to be of much help), I gather from his website that the “sequencing” and “proportioning” of the materials used in the CenterStage2M have changed. In addition, “damping” has been added “in the very last stage in an amount that would eliminate the internal noise of the product and the component without rolling off the top end of the acoustic envelope.”
Whatever he has done, to my ear Joe has finally and fully succeeded. The CenterStage2M is an unqualified triumph. The differences it makes under any and all components are unmistakable and entirely for the better. Available in three progressively larger, taller, and more effective versions, CenterStage2M’s do three things that I really like: reduce noise, increase density of timbre (particularly in the bass and lower midrange), and improve clarity. Just as important is what they don’t do, which is markedly soften or roll-off the treble, blunt transients, constrain dynamic range, or reduce dimensionality.
I’ll give you one example, which can stand in for all the components I’ve used a quartet of the CenterStage2M’s with. You wouldn’t think (or, at least, I wouldn’t have thought) that footers would have a profound effect on the sonics of a world-class tape deck such as the Metaxas & Sins Tourbillon T-RX (which, along with the United Home Audio SuperDeck, was already the most lifelike source component I’d ever heard). But you’d (and I’d) be wrong.
Of course, a tape deck does add vibration in a way that static electronic components don’t. It has two large moving parts—ten-inch reels—that can wobble a bit in motion, thanks to the slight unevenness of NAB hubs. This constant, low-level vibration is transmitted through the entire deck (and into whatever it is sitting on), which is why studio decks are often built-into massive stands. Sticking four CenterStage2M’s under the U-shaped bracket and cylindrical “feet” of the Tourbillon seemed more like a re- cipe for instability than for lower noise and better sound, but it turned out to be a sonic wonderment. Indeed, the size and quality of the improvement startled me.
Tone color, which was already outstanding, suddenly became richer and more natural, particularly in the midbass and lower midrange (which weren’t thin to begin with). Understand that this was not a “lumping up” of energy (as with the port effect of certain speakers); it was just a more lifelike fullness that not only added density to timbre but focus and dimensionality to the instruments producing that timbre. In addition, transient detail seemed to “stand out” with greater clarity, as if traces of background noise had been washed away like chalk marks sponged off a blackboard. The net result was an unmistakable increase in neutrality and completeness, and hence in the magical illusion of real instruments and instrumentalists playing (near visibly) in a real space.
Where I couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend previous iterations of CenterStages, the CenterStage2M’s are a different matter. I can and do recommend them for use under all components, as their upside is now substantial and their downside indetectable. Let me warn you in advance that these little cylindrical devices aren’t cheap. If I knew what was inside them, I might be able to say that their material construction justifies their cost. But I don’t, so I can’t. What I can say, however, is that their sonic benefits make them worth their price.
Specs & Pricing
Price: CenterStage2M 0.8″ (height), $280 each; CenterStage2M 1.0″ (height), $545 each; CenterStage2M 1.5″ (height), $795 each (sold in sets of four, with shims supplied)
CRITICAL MASS SYSTEMS
(630) 640-3814
info@criticalmasssystems.com
By Jonathan Valin
I’ve been a creative writer for most of life. Throughout the 80s and 90s, I wrote eleven novels and many stories—some of which were nominated for (and won) prizes, one of which was made into a not-very-good movie by Paramount, and all of which are still available hardbound and via download on Amazon. At the same time I taught creative writing at a couple of universities and worked brief stints in Hollywood. It looked as if teaching and writing more novels, stories, reviews, and scripts was going to be my life. Then HP called me up out of the blue, and everything changed. I’ve told this story several times, but it’s worth repeating because the second half of my life hinged on it. I’d been an audiophile since I was in my mid-teens, and did all the things a young audiophile did back then, buying what I could afford (mainly on the used market), hanging with audiophile friends almost exclusively, and poring over J. Gordon Holt’s Stereophile and Harry Pearson’s Absolute Sound. Come the early 90s, I took a year and a half off from writing my next novel and, music lover that I was, researched and wrote a book (now out of print) about my favorite classical records on the RCA label. Somehow Harry found out about that book (The RCA Bible), got my phone number (which was unlisted, so to this day I don’t know how he unearthed it), and called. Since I’d been reading him since I was a kid, I was shocked. “I feel like I’m talking to God,” I told him. “No,” said he, in that deep rumbling voice of his, “God is talking to you.” I laughed, of course. But in a way it worked out to be true, since from almost that moment forward I’ve devoted my life to writing about audio and music—first for Harry at TAS, then for Fi (the magazine I founded alongside Wayne Garcia), and in the new millennium at TAS again, when HP hired me back after Fi folded. It’s been an odd and, for the most part, serendipitous career, in which things have simply come my way, like Harry’s phone call, without me planning for them. For better and worse I’ve just gone with them on instinct and my talent to spin words, which is as close to being musical as I come.
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