Nordost Sort Kones Review

Your hard earned money goes out the door and in return a fine set of audio components settles on your equipment rack, with the promise of audio bliss. It doesn’t always work that way. Why not?

The great enemy of high fidelity reproduction is vibration. We all understand this when it comes to turntables, where floating suspension systems, enormous mass and magnetic bearings are just some of the approaches taken to reduce the effect of vibration. We must worry about vibrations coming from the components themselves (their motors, power supplies and so on) as well as the sound born vibrations coming from the speakers and even footfalls on floorboards. A whole industry has developed around this problem, and some of the solutions offered can be quite exotic, technologically advanced and expensive.

Today, we’re going to look at Sort Kones, a range of cone shaped objects from US cable manufacturer Nordost. You might ask yourself what has cable manufacturing to do with vibration control. There’s a simple answer to that. Pass energy though a conductor and that will induce mechanical vibration into the conducting strands themselves, a factor all cable manufacturers must deal with.

Sort Kones take a different approach from other vibration control devices. Nordost believes that the most dangerous vibrations are those that originate inside the components. Transformers, power supply capacitors, DACs, transistors and tubes all produce vibrations, and these vibrations occur just where the delicate signal flows. Ideally we would provide a path to remove all these vibrations from the equipment. Rather than isolating the components from the rack, which is the approach taken most commonly, Sort Kones provide a direct path to remove vibrations from the components and route them into the supporting rack, shelf or floor. If we can channel the vibrations created within the components away from the other delicate electrical circuitry inside the components, we allow them to perform optimally. That’s the plan, in simple terms. How does it work in practice?

Sort Kones are designed to support your components at three or more points instead of the feet that come standard. You put them, flat side down, underneath the component as close as possible to the power supplies and motors inside the box. You will need to know where these parts are so look for pictures on the internet of your amp, DAC or CD player with the lid off, or ask the manufacturer. You could also work by trial and error or by feel but the research effort is the best way. Nordost provides a detailed installation guide and we include a link here if you are interested.

www.nordost.com/default/downloads/SortKoneInstructions.pdf

Let’s take a look inside a Sort Kone (below).

You can see three distinct pieces inside the shell – a post, a base and a ball which couples the post to the ball. There is no soft material here to cushion the vibrations. The components are all very hard. Nordost offers four Sort Kone models, each built out of different materials. In ascending order of price, they are:

AS – aluminum post and base combined with a hardened steel coupling ball. $79.99 each

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