…properly deployed, the Stillpoints products can move your system significantly down the musical road to where it needs to be. … This is about working with the fundamentals of system infrastructure, and Stillpoints can be a key building block in that process, helping define the physical environment in which your system operates, isolating (and preserving) the signal, rather than just the equipment.
~ Roy Gregory, The Audio Beat, July 2013
When I’m presenting the TAB System Optimization seminars, one of the really big steps upward in performance comes when, having already bypassed the feet under the equipment using wooden blocks, we substitute trios of Ultra Minis. The increase in transparency and focus, the drop in the noise floor, the increase in dynamic range, resolution and the range of tonal colors is nothing short of dramatic -- "Is this the same system?" dramatic. And that’s before I point out the improvements in ensemble playing, physical presence, the sense of rhythm and tempo, the relationship between the instruments, how good the track sounds -- hell, how good the musicians sound. That’s the difference that a properly executed support strategy can make -- the difference between a decipherable recording and a living breathing event, a presentation that you have to work out and one that just draws you in. You see, I can throw as many hi-fi clichés at you as you like and the Stillpoints pretty much cover the bases, but what’s really significant is not the sonic differences these products make, but the musical ones; the fact that the performance presented by your system sounds more musical, more engaging and much more immediately involving.”
~ Roy Gregory, The Audio Beat, July 2013
My own lengthy Stillpoints experience changed when last summer I received enough products to float my entire system. This left me in no doubt as to just how limited those early but lengthy listening experiments really were and how I had previously only really scratched the surface of what could be achieved musically - without changing a single component. I think this is both the critical point and the very essence of the whole Stillpoints equation.
~ Chris Thomas, HiFi+, Issue 99
Reviewed by Chris Thomas, HiFi+ Issue #60
The David Berning Quadrature Z Mono Power Amplifiers (& Stillpoints ESS Rack)
The Stillpoints are a carefully considered and logically structured product line that attacks a clearly defined problem with equally clear results; would that it were always so. You can’t listen to a product -- you can only listen to a system, which in some cases makes reaching conclusions a bit like nailing jello to the ceiling. The Stillpoints offer a closed solution to a single question. Believe it or not, they are as easy as it gets.
~ Roy Gregory, The Audio Beat, September 2012
Reviewed by Roy Gregory, HiFi+ Issue #61
"My first exposure to Berning electronics was in a system at the Montreal Show a good few years ago. It was the same system that introduced us to Stillpoints – and was producing not just one of the best sounds at the show, but impressive sound by any measure. It was an encounter that had a profound effect on our thinking..."