(page 2)

Construction and Appearance (continued)

The top and bottom cylinders are made in such a way that stacking two or more units is possible, although I can't imagine stacking more than two of them at a time. The top cylinder is also equipped with a small indentation, centered and just around the threaded hole. This indentation allows easy placement of a single Tungsten Carbide ball.

Couple of things I wish were better about this product: First, at $400 a pop I would have expected a better box for the set. As shipped, they come in an ordinary, white cardboard box with stickers identifying the content. I bought items at a tenth of their price sporting the same type of a box. Yes, I hear you, the box has nothing to do with their performance, but at these prices it would be a nice and welcomed touch. And second, something I just find a bit annoying: The Aurios love fingerprints. As soon as you take them out of the box you have fingerprints all over them. If things like this bother you, just keep a clean, dry cloth handy.

Setup

For this and the other five footer reviews I will be using my upstairs system. The CD player is a Cambridge Audio D500SE, the amplification a Classe CA-101 power amp with directly mounted EVS Ultimate Attenuators for adjusting volume. The speakers are a pair of Magnepan MMGs and the cabling by Nordost: Red Dawn interconnects and Flatline Gold MkII speaker cables. The CD player and amp are on top of the DIY Rack we built earlier. The rack shelves are pretty good themselves at controlling vibration so in order to have a more representative shelf I placed a standard shelf on top of the DIY rack supported only by the tips of the four rack pillars. A few taps on this shelf nicely confirmed that we now have a sufficiently resonant platform for our tests. Our primary assessment will be based on three footers under the CD player, two in front and one in the back. This arrangement will ensure consistency throughout the footer reviews.

Although setup is said to have been improved, the Aurios 1.2's were still the most difficult to setup of all under review. Getting them underneath the CD player was easy. Getting them individually aligned took a good five minutes the first time around (you get better with practice). When properly aligned each Aurio should have its top cylinder perfectly aligned with the bottom one. Perfectly aligned means that when observed from all directions the left and right edges of the top cylinder should line up with the left and right edges of the bottom cylinder. Often you would have two of them just fine, only to find out the third is off by a bit. The cables also exhibit enough pull to offset the alignment more often than I would have liked (the power cable in particular). Nevertheless it pays off to get them as best aligned as you can. When properly aligned the audio component will "float" freely and gently sway to-and-fro when lightly pushed from any side. I found pushing the CD player's buttons to be tricky, always producing the above effect. Pushing the power button without holding the player with the other hand was almost impossible. Conversely misalignment was imminent.

For best performance I've placed the Aurios directly under 1) the CD drive mechanism, 2) the power transformer and 3) in a position to complete a stable triangle. The picture above shows the original arrangement which proved less effective than the 1, 2, 3 arrangement I just described.

The Aurios Media Isolation Bearings 1.2