Critical Mass Systems Center Stage2M equipment footers

A couple of years ago, I heard the Critical Mass Systems Center Stage2. These clever feet took the longest time to work their craft, in fact often sounding truly awful for a few days before turning into something consistently remarkable. When the new Center Stage^2M (hereafter, referred to as ‘CS^2M’) arrived, I mistakenly thought that perhaps the change would speed up that process of working with the product. I was wrong; you need to devote a week to 10 days of things sounding just plain ‘wrong’ before they go so very, very right.

Aside from the change to the name on the side of each foot, there are few clues as to what’s changed from the outside. Inside, things are different. In developing the original, it became clear that what applied to making electronics sound superb didn’t quite work so well for loudspeakers. Ultimately, where making gasket material down to one-thousandth of an inch tolerances was fine for electronics, the loudspeakers required tolerances an order of magnitude tighter… and when that sort of gasket tolerance was reapplied to the devices sitting under audio electronics, the improvement was so significant the CS^2M was born.

Of course, it’s not quite that simple. I spoke to Joseph Lavrencik, the sharp-of-mind guy behind Critical Mass Systems. He suggested that “The original CS² was finalised using an additive approach; keep adding material until there was just enough grip to control the soundstage. CS^2M was developed using a subtractive approach; remove material until images were solidly layered and musically accurate.” This proved not to be a subtle change, he says, adding that, “Using this approach, we could actually move the centre image backward and forward in space until the detail was precisely correct relative to the size and ‘weight’ of the ancillary images across a broad spectrum of music.”

The basic operation of the original CS² holds with the CS^2M. They act to mitigate surface-borne vibration, while cancelling out their own potential to add noise. The long wait while they make things sound worse is because – as Critical Mass Systems suggests – they transfer entropy out of the component itself. Once in a state of equilibrium, they stay that way, which brings me to my biggest problem with both the CS² and CS^2M; the impatient box-swappers of audio will seldom give themselves ten days grace to let the system deroogelate itself (no real terms exist for this process, so I knitted my own). And those of us who have a high review churn rate will get to enjoy what the CS^2M can do to an entire system about once or twice a year.