Dealer endorsement. "Good to see an English review for Wellfloat underway. Their basic platform happens to be the exact dimensions to match Wolf von Langa's Son speakers. On unstable wooden floors here it makes a significant improvement not only in bass performance. Wellfloat works equally well under the adjustable stands I created for Wing Acoustics and Mon's mini monitors. Carbide footers reside under Chicago speakers powered by Enleum." It was signed Peter Hardie, Reference Audio. Here's a reader and importer for whom resonance control isn't just lazy lip service but a topic deserving his fullest attention. As his product roster shows, our ears agree on brands like Bakoon/Enleum, COS, Crayon, Linear Tube Audio, Puritan, Raal-Requisite and Soundaware. Recognizing good stuff isn't about believing. It's just paying attention to proper setup so it performs best. The rest is perfectly self-evident.

Do I see eyes roll back from sheer ennui or high-handedness over tweaks? In which case, let's briefly talk tweaks. Digital filter settings. I can barely hear those. Costly audiophile servers. My iMac with Audirvana, a ~€500 network switch on the RJ45 input for cloudy files and a ~€500 USB bridge on the output pulls even with most of them for pennies on the pound. AC filters. Those I do hear but mostly I prefer passive power distributors. When it comes to active powerline filtering, I actually think that DC filters do more. Tone controls, EQ/room-correction plug-ins. They're probably the most audible, surgically precise tweaks extant. Cardioid subwoofers properly integrated are a close second. I find isolation footers particularly on suspended floors for speakers and/or sub more potent than AC filters. Now I hear protests about my tweak list. To me a tweak is anything we can either remove directly without losing sound; or remove then rewire and have sound back with one less piece of kit. That second half applies to subs, network switches, software players like Audirvana, power filters if we have sufficient wall outlets without them, audiophile servers when our PC has an RJ45 input and USB output, preamps if our source does volume and so forth. Now imagine working with a high-power microscope. The tiniest mechanical jitter shall blur our vision. In fact our microscope won't work properly if its mechanical isolation wasn't flawless. If in a similarly high-resolution context we replace microscope with loudspeaker, mechanical feedback likewise blurs our sonic vision. Clearly the Wellfloat is just a tweak. Our sound goes on without it. Certainly it's far from financially immaterial. With tweaks, expense often conjures up the fleecing of the gullible. But what if proper mechanical isolation can make our transducers work demonstrably better? Now the same money spent on a new amp, even loads more won't cancel the fact that unless we first attend to our speakers' mechanical crosstalk with our room's structural underpinnings, no shinier kit ahead of it will eliminate our bottleneck at the end of the hifi chain. Weakest link and all that.

One other snippet. In our first Swiss residence, my sound platform venting into an open kitchen/office space was a massive slab of concrete. So imagine my surprise when one fine day, I sit barefoot in my listening chair with the system playing only to feel my soles tickled by bass pulses. It's not just suspended flooring which transmits vibrations. Of course concrete isn't resonant to act as an amplifying device. But it's certainly transmissive to distribute speaker-induced vibrations into our equipment rack. How much or little that matters is for your ears to judge. Just don't equate solid with vibration proof as though only upper floors were potentially troublesome. Onto the present. When my FedEx tracker arrived, origins showed Osaka/Japan. Until Wellfloat enjoy broader distribution, intrepid customers in un-serviced countries will deal with a foreign importer like David who'll either ship from stock or organize their delivery from Japan. If you're European, you already know to add VAT to US shipments. Packed simply but exceptionally, my sturdy carton proved to be custom-sized to house eight small boxes with no space to shift. That gave me two immaculately finished quads to experiment with. First curtain call was this upstairs system reconfigured for…

… this hardware mix.

Because these Wellfloat are quite big, two were enough per speaker stand. Though I frankly doubted that here they'd make any difference whatsoever given how my sub isolates on Divine Acoustics Kepler footers and the multi-stage Hifistay isolation rack is very efficient itself, I duly commenced a without/with/without sequence. The speakers' low weight made that child's play.