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the abso!ute sound by Anthony C. Chiarella The Marigo Audio Lab VTS Dots COST-CONSCIOUS VIBRATION CONTROL FOR THE '90s H AVE YOU EVER wondered how the retail prices of High End audio products are established? Ideally, a manufacturer would determine material, labor, packaging, and promotional expenses and apply a markup as prescribed by industry convention-to the resulting cost per unit. What is significant is that, in the above scenario, the value of an object is based upon the costs of producing that object. And while the prices of most consumer durables are derived in this manner, a growing number of High End manufacturers and distributors are predicating their pricing not upon manufacturing costs, but upon the magnitude of sonic improvement offered. In this case, if a simple accessory enhanced the sound quality of a system to the same extent as an elaborate component, there would be some justification for charging as much for the accessory as for the component, regardless of the differences in their underlying cost structures. I find such a prospect unnerving: When a purveyor of High End equipment bases the price of a product upon anything other than its cost of manufacture, he or she supplies ammunition to those cynics who believe our industry to be populated by snake-oil-selling charlatans, and those customers who support us to be pathetic dupes. Are the Marigo Audio Labs VTS Dots the best vibration control products available? The dispensation of superlatives is not, in my opinion, the point of this review. More important is that Ronald Hedrich, President of Marigo, has accomplished what Michael Kelly has with his Aerial 10T, and what Art Ferris has with his Modulus 3: He has engineered the performance of the best competitive products into a line of accessories that every audiophile can afford. In an era of ever-escalating prices, Mr. Hedrich joins the vanguard of manufacturers who understand that price is not necessarily a predictor of quality. Since the Marigo Dots will inevitably be compared to those manufactured by Combak/Harmonix, it should be noted that the two companies' approaches to vibration control are completely different. The Combak Dots are "resonance tuning" devices, wherein the vibration of a body is shifted, or tuned, to a specified frequency bandwidth which can be dissipated within the dot. The Marigo products, on the other hand, employ the principle of constrained layer damping. Here, the vibration of the body is not altered in frequency, but is dissipated by the use of multiple layers of materials whose physical characteristics are dissimilar, but whose damping characteristics are complementary. By varying the size of the Dots and the composition and quantity of the layers, Hedrich is able to apply this concept to any part of an audio system you would care to damp: There are variations for treating speaker cones, speaker baskets, speaker cabinets, PC boards, component chassis, capacitors, transistors, vacuum tubes, speaker/stand interfaces, walls, windows, interconnects... the list goes on. I recommend starting with woofer cones (where the dots removed a slight upper bass chestiness from my Aerials), tweeter flanges, preamp PC boards and vacuum tubes, D/A converter chips, and phone cartridges. Of course, the order in which you proceed will depend upon the specific components which populate your system, but the complete treatment should cost under $300. While space constraints prohibit a detailed description of the enhancements which accompany each application, I must relate a couple of telling examples. The cymbal strike at the end of Steely Dan's Gaucho [MCA-6102] has, on my system, consistently betrayed a slight electronic sizzle. Attaching one 4mm white dot to the bottom of each preamp tube mitigated the problem, and subsequent placement of those dots near the comers of the main PC board along with 4mm dots at the top edge of each capacitor completely banished this artifact. Need proof that these things work before you slather them all over your gear? Chip in with your audiophile friends and buy the 4mm white dots ($69/package of 25). Stick one on the front vertical surface of your phone cartridge and follow the triangle during Symphonic Dances [Athena ALSW1000]. I, for one, had not previously realized how much of the instrument's decay component had been captured on this record. I have been experimenting with energy-control concepts since long before the practice was in fashion, and I developed an axiom in order to determine whether a given damping accessory yields a musically worthy result: A beneficial vibration control device will generate exactly the opposite audible effect as will a detrimental product. The hallmarks of proper vibration damping are improved midrange bloom, a heightened awareness of microdynamics, and a more complete rendition of high-frequency instrumental decay. A system in which these qualities are diminished will be described, consciously or otherwise, as "overdamped." The science and art of vibration control requires that a designer damp those noises which are spuriously generated by the component, without obscuring the delicate resonant signatures which constitute the thumbprint of a musical event. In my experience, the VTS Dots are among the few products in this genre which strike the correct balance between these two objectives. For those of you who have balked at the prices of vibration control devices, the VTS Dots will come as an affordable and effective alternative.
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