AL-ZORBO™.

To reproduce music is like taking a photograph. The very slightest vibration will affect the quality of a picture. Those who have not seen the object in reality do not know how much better the picture could have been. With hifi equipment it is the same. Once vibrations are well under control, the sonic improvements are amazing. All hifi equipment is exposed to vibrations and therefore to effects of resonance interfering in a wide spectrum of distortions. The moment we play music in a room, all the physical objects, the hifi equipment making no exception, are mechanically excited by sound waves. Add to this the vibrations generated inside the equipment by transformers and moving mechanical parts. As vacuum tubes, capacitors, inductors, and cables are microphonic in various degrees, they pick up mechanical oscillations and translate them into electrical ones, parasitically mixing with the music signal.

There have been a variety of approaches to deal with that disturbing energy. Special feet and platforms have been devised. But usually these solutions address only one side. Accessory feet provide a ‘one-stop’ interface, unconcerned with the base on which the equipment rests, while platforms usually provide a new base, without separating the interaction of each foot with the base, and depending on their design may not provide any resonance absorption faculty.

The Ensemble AL-ZORBO™ equipment platform offers a new concept of multi-level resonance control. Uniting isolation and attenuation as well as distributing its action into four zones, it provides equipment with an ideal, practically resonance-free base and at the same time addresses vibrations generated both by sound waves and from within the equipment.

With the upper platform part divided into four sections, each foot of the equipment couples separately into a very light, constrained-mode sandwich structure resting on a flexible, low mass that is able to drain and absorb vibrations from the equipment. The platform is isolated from a shelf or furniture top, etc. by very effective elastic feet, formulated to attenuate vibrations drastically from the lowest frequencies right across the entire audio frequency band. These upper and lower levels are separated by a heavy mass that acts as a low amplitude buffer and provides a good acoustic inertia ratio with the other materials. Provision is further made to have either four or three isolating feet in use.

Equipment (recommended maximum weight: 35 kg (77 lbs) put on an elegant AL-ZORBO platform not only looks attractive, but when music starts to play, you instantly hear a dramatic sonic improvement. In fact, with every piece of music you realize how relatively blurred and veiled the music sounded before. The music now has a natural and relaxed quality, sounds dynamic and rhythmically lively without a hint of nervousness or strain. Suddenly you find yourself transported into a musical space where crisp transients, a coherent sense of timing, a widened and deepened soundstage, a wealth of ambient information, a natural bloom in the high frequencies, and tight, contoured bass, etc. continue to amaze and fascinate.

With Ensemble equipment, which has anti-resonance features on all levels already integrated into it, user feedback confirms that accessory feet of all sorts have practically no effect. The addition of an AL-ZORBO platform, however, brings the performance to a level where the music rises  with even lighter wings, freed from the last remaining residues of interference, showing that the AL-ZORBO is indeed a performance class of its own.

Hear it for yourself. Put a monochassis turntable on an AL-ZORBO and find its performance transformed. Try an AL-ZORBO platform under a middle-of-the-road CD player and hear it lifted into a category several times the price of an upgrade.
The only warning we have: Your first AL-ZORBO platform may not be the only one…