OK, I definitely prefer the Lack to the Isoblue. These are both tracks I am very familiar with. On the Eagles cut I found the Isoblue both flat and sharp at the same time (that should give the musicians something to think about). Sharp in the sense of being a bit forward and emphasizing transients and flat in just being less dynamic and engaging. It was clear from the first guitar strums. On the Lack I felt the emotion coming through and was sad when it ended - where is my chorus? "You can't hide your lying eyes, And your smile is a thin disguise, I thought by now you'd realize, There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes". I didn't bother listening to the Isoblue clip to the end.
Then on to the Rickie Lee Jones. Once again I preferred the Lack to the Isoblue and again the difference was immediately apparent. On the Isoblue is that a rubber band on a cardboard box? Switch to the Lack and it IS a bass with reasonable tonality to it. Again more emotion with the Lack. However, this album is one I have used for demonstration for decades* so I have heard it on lots of systems. I'm afraid I wasn't all that thrilled with either of the versions here and wasn't looking forward to them going on. Maybe with the Archidee and Pre-1st I would have wanted to hear the whole track.
*When Rickie Lee Jones came out it was such a good record and so well recorded that we used it all the time for demos. We had a deal back then where we lent a record store a Hi-Fi system and they let us borrow 30 records a month for demo purposes. This way we could try new records and always have fresh copies. Rickie Lee Jones was the only record we got every single month for years.
I hope I'm not coming through harsh here. Certainly it is your system and you are hearing it in room while we aren't so you have to go with what feels right. All I can do is report what I hear and how it feels to me. There are some interesting thoughts that have come up with regards to supports through the last few pages of this thread and I thought I'd put forward some ideas, findings and conjecture about it all. First off, while I do like the Archidee I do not feel it is the ultimate LP12 support, just a very good one. In my own experience, which I believe I recounted earlier but will repeat here, I found the Mimer K on a four shelf Harmoni reference rack to be more musical than the Archidee and used it for quite some time under the LP12. When I decided to make the NOKTable I was trying to make it as good as the Archidee since no tables like that were being made and since few people have Harmonihyllan racks. I was pleased when both the metalwork and the top board of the NOKTable were found to be superior to the Archidee. I was surprised and even more pleased when I found it was also more musical than the Harmoni Mimer. Unfortunately, the NOKTable is currently at a standstill as the company who made the metalwork for me sent me a small batch that were out of spec (I was lucky they hadn't managed to build the entire order). Being pragmatic about things I intend to evaluate the out of spec one in case it is actually better (a possibility I consider small). Either way I am also likely to have to find another company to do the metalwork in order to meet my needs but it isn't easy since I am not buying hundreds at once and I have very specific requirements. Anyway, I do accept that the Archidee has its faults too, I just find them less than the Lack or the Isoblue. I also don't think they bother me as much as they do Fredrik, who is more sensitive to certain qualities than I am.
This also brings me to the other stand which seems to have started this latest batch of clips - the Isola. What I think would be really interesting would be to compare the Isola to the Archidee. It, like the NOKTable, was designed as an Archidee replacement so it would be interesting to see how you and the owner felt it actually compared. The Isola is interesting in that it uses a lightweight metal framework, like the Archidee and NOKTable but uses a spruce top like the Harmonihyllan racks use for Odin and Tor shelves. An interesting product combining those two ideas into one product and one that seems like it might work as we have found spruce to be a quite musical wood.
I didn't try spruce when I created the NOKTable because I didn't feel it was a place where solid wood would actually work. The reason for this is that I did have the idea years ago that a solid hardwood might be even better than the mdf top on the Archidee. Since the best hardwood I had heard for a LP12 plinth (and still have heard, for that matter) was movingui, I reasoned it would be the logical choice for an Archidee top. I went onto the bay and found a pair of bookmatched pieces of movingui that were just the right size. I talked to Chris Harbam about how to join them and he ended up just having me ship them to him. He did his normal expert job of joining them and bringing them down to perfectly flat and my desired size and I finished them using the wiping varnish he uses on the plinths. Then I tried it in place of the mdf on my Archidee and the results were not good at all. The mdf was easily more musical.
This was before I switched to the Mimer K but I had for some time felt that an LP12, being a device that works by sensing vibrations and translates them into electrical signals, and being spring suspended, needed a different type of support than that which worked the best for electronics. I had experimented with different racks and shelves and had found my electronics to be more musical on Quadraspire Q4 shelves than on the Archidee but the LP12 was the opposite, sounding easily less musical on the Q4 than on the Archidee. I was actually quite surprised when I found the Harmonihyllan was actually quite good on both, although you needed a Mimer K to actually outperform an Archidee, so you still weren't sitting the turntable on solid wood. But then the NOKTable was better yet. Some also like to use the NOKTable for electronics and it can work well there (one of my distributors really likes two NOKTables with LP12 on one and Boazu/Slipsik on the other). But I still find the Harmoni racks better for electronics.
So I didn't go farther with solid wood when working on the NOKTable as my experience had been that it wouldn't work. I do notice the Isola uses a much thicker piece of wood than the movingui I used and it is, of course, different wood. So all bets are off. But it all makes me even more interested in how the Isola would compare to the Archidee and what would happen if you switched the tops? I suppose that's probably enough to chew on for now. I will just mention that I'd love to answer more of these questions myself and I do intend to test the two pieces of metalwork soon. But my main Hi-Fi system is in a bit of a state of chaos right now (more on what that means later). I have also had a cold for over a month and a half as well as a slightly sick dog to deal with. So I haven't been able to do a number of tests I have wanted to do. It will all get straightened out in the end.
