Ball Bearing Isolation Feet

Nice Looking and good value feet with surprising performance

[Ball Beads]
[Italian version here]

Product: Isolation Feet for electronics and spakers
Sold by: Preffair Store / Aliexpress - China
Recommended Retail Price: 17€
Reviewer: Piero Canova - TNT Italy
Reviewed: May, 2023

Introduction

Some weeks ago I was selling some power amplifiers and as usual in the end, I came back home with a DAC from Accuphase. So far nothing exciting but, while I was installing on it an IEC socket to use one of my power cables, I noticed the poor quality of the feet under it so I started to search for some cheap feet with potentially better performances. Browsing several pages on the Internet I came across some feet that did look nice and had a price of just 17€ postage included, so I decided to give them a try. After one month of waiting, they finally arrived and were installed under the DAC; I didn't expect this to be just the beginning of a long series of trials nor that they deserved a full article here on TNT.

How they are made.

They are available in four different colors: (black, silver, gold and stainless steel); the base can be either in aluminum or stainless steel or ceramic. Plenty of combinations to test so let's first have a look at the detail of the construction.

The picture below shows well how they are made.

[Ball Beads]

The feet are made of two main parts in which a hemispherical depression is cut. A ball bearing is installed between the two halves; the diameter of the ball is smaller than that of the two cut outs so the contact surface is largely reduced (not to the extent of a spike, but very close). To keep the two bases stable a silicone o-ring is used. Now, vibrations can be purely vertical or horizontal or most likely a mix of the two. These feet act like spikes vertically and like soft feet horizontally; we can call them dampened spikes or something similar. The feet arrive already assembled and ready to use; the only option is if you want to use a thin rubber pad on the wide side and, in case of use under speakers, a stainless steel screw can used to fix them.

How do they sound

Since there are several options I will try to describe separately each of them.

[Ball Beads - exploded view]

I did try one more configuration which is to use two 4mm ceramic balls kept in place by a tiny drop of grease before assembling the feet. Here, having two spheres of small diameter touching each other and being very rigid we get close to a perfect spike and the sound goes effectively in this direction with a substantial drying of low frequencies and an emphasis in the high range.

In the end, I am using four sets of aluminum feet: one under the CD player with a ceramic ball, one under the DAC with a ceramic ball and two under the power amps with a steel ball. I have tested them also under my line stage and my phono preamplifiers and they perform very close to the G.Flex feet I have right now. Considering that the G-Flex are now out of production and that the last set of feet I found second hand cost me 120€ it is evident their excellent performance/cost ratio.

Conclusions

These ball bearing isolation feet have a top performance coupled with a bargain price. Add that they can be tuned according to your needs and taste and you have an almost perfect product. My advice is to buy a set of four and test them: it will be just the beginning....

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© Copyright 2023 Piero Canova - piero@tnt-audio.com - www.tnt-audio.com