Open-door policy: minds work like parachutes so best when open. The door to my main system simply remains always open just to depressurize the space. Still, I remained mindful of not getting judgmental as I reached for words to describe my personal results. The effects embedded fully in the total sound like adding just enough of a particular spice to an already well-seasoned stew. It'll change the taste just a bit but not betray the extra ingredient like a higher dose would. Correctly identifying that spice should take a seriously evolved palate. But just how many of us are Michelin-star chefs in the hifi kitchen? Once I determined that one B2 atop and another in front of the speakers caused my sense of energetic compression, I wondered what treating just the subwoofer might do. That's in by 6dB at 80Hz. Bass grew more striated or wiry. That made it more other than the bandwidth above. It became a tell on the sub's presence not by excess loudness or delayed timing but dissimilar texture. The delta of this shift was far smaller than the aforementioned mystery boxes had been but still reliably discernable. Putting two B2 beneath a passive pre-NCF² Furutech 6-outlet power distributor on the speaker/sub amps and active crossover made the sound somewhat glassier. Again that was a discernable shift, just another one in a direction I didn't fancy. Looking for more downstairs candidates, a Denafrips Avatar CD transport suggested itself as a source of vibrational spin for a change. Two B2 on/off seemed to shuttle between a bit more/less 'pure'. Given the subtlety of these final A/B, I'd simply not spend €250 or €500 on matters this deep in the shadow margins.

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Searching for more light moved me into my office aka 6M HQ. There a compact high-resolution system streams local tunes via Audirvana Origin into a Singxer SU-2 USB bridge into an iFi iDSD Pro Signature DAC into active DSP-tweaked DMAX speakers on Gravity stands. An iFi USB3 cable and iPurifier partake in the digital signal path. iFi's upsampler works to 705.6kHz with their Gibbs transient-optimized filter. The small-signal triodes are bypassed. Going full hog, one B2 sat on each speaker, one each on the outer edges of my desk. A fifth sat centered at the far edge of the suspended Plywood tray for my logi keyboard. Rather than start without the French pucks, this time I kicked off with them to trick my mind. Nothing about this nearfield sound telegraphed any direct misgivings whatsoever. Once the B2 contingent exited stage right and about two minutes passed, I suddenly became more aware of the sound originating with the sealed solid Oak cabs. Then I noticed how bass was a bit more portly and unruly. That was Gonzalo Rubalcaba's piano and a bass guitar accompanying Polish songstress Anna Maria Jopek on the Minione album. Back in the Frenchies went. A few minutes passed. Lo and behold, the bass became more pert and grippy, the wood cubes again subtracted better from my ear/brain's assessment of sonics caused by mechanical kit. If only Spock had been there to offer a super-terse 'fascinating'. But he wasn't. I'll have to do. I also thought that three B2 on the table's wood elements behaved as we'd expect of mass dampers; which is to absorb micro vibrations. Pleased to be reporting from my personal win column now, I eyed my final upstairs system. Would it follow the main rig; or desktop kit?

First I had one more micro test for the big system. Ancient Audio's Lektor Transport had just landed. Its nude top loader works like a bladeless helicopter. Would surrounding this air turbulence with three B2 do anything audible other than look a bit like a C.E.C.'s transport's massive suspension towers? Ancient's hewn-from-solid aluminium slab wouldn't respond to mass damping. It's already super inert. That left any potential B2 action for the mysterious realm of water molecules. For my mundane ears, that proved far too mysterious. I couldn't tell a thing. Perhaps my ideas about this were faulty to begin with? I simply had to try.

Upstairs I was mostly back in the land of mysteries and listeners whose ears and gears vastly exceed mine. Think Laurent Thorin and Roy Gregory for just two. Their prior B2 reviews were most enthusiastic. It's nothing I could replicate to their extent. Going for another symmetrical treatment—six placed as below, another fronting the left speaker behind the Pass amp, the last one behind the sub to face its rear-aimed driver—and playing she-loves-me she-loves-me-not with some settle time in-between, the only certainty I felt was that the B2 atop of and fronting the drivers again caused what I call energetic damping. I couldn't really tell the presence of the two units on the upper rack shelves.

At this stage of the game, I nearly found its theory more compelling than the actual practice; except that I'd welcomed the subtle but benign results on the desktop's extreme nearfield. 33.3rpm has special audiophile significance. Parlayed to success with just 1 out of 3 systems, I'm not sure the same applies here. Just so, we all key into different playback aspects. Virtually by definition this implies blind spots where we've not trained ourselves to pay the same attention. "What do you mean? You can't hear that difference? It's so obvious." If this was just such a test, I mostly failed it. Score one for the blind spots?

It seems a fair sentiment to exit with. But adventurous aural pilgrims certainly shouldn't let my mostly fails deter them from minting their own experiences with Neodio's B2. Who knows, they might just follow Roy Gregory's example to find these 'acoustic purifiers' impossible to live without.

Stéphane Even comments: "Considering the excellent feedback about the Origine B2 from experienced reviewers and customers alike, I'm puzzled by your results. I can only offer a hypothesis. If I look at your photos, I see that in your systems there is some decoupling interface material for the racks and loudspeakers. How the Origine B2 works, this raises the question of 'physical grounding'. I'm afraid that those interfaces killed the B2 effect. More generally, your systems are already optimized with various products and in this context, adding an accessory and hoping for an improvement is like adding a good musician to an already good orchestra. Not sure it can improve anything. My approach to hifi is different from yours and more oriented towards simplicity and Zen. There are so many ways to music. Neodio will launch two new products not accessories this year so there should be some opportunity for another review."