Franc Audio Ceramic Disc Classic brought Home the HiFi+ Accessory of the Year Award
Pawel Skulimowski is a Polish mechanical engineer and amateur drummer who has been making the Franc Audio range of isolation products for over a decade now.
He claims to have discovered a technique of joining really hard and stiff ceramic materials together with light aluminum alloy and elastic plastics. And the result is models like the Ceramic Disc Classic.
The Ceramic Disc Classic stands 45mm high and is 68mm in diameter at its base and here the top cap is free floating and can be removed to reveal a ceramic ball in the middle of a carbon fibre spider. The top cap is covered in smooth plastic and is 46mm in diameter, the idea is that the base of the equipment rests on the foot directly, bypassing the equipment’s own feet. This foot is available in sets of three as standard, other quantities on request. There are also Slim and Fat versions, with the smaller model coming in at 25mm high by 59mm in diameter at its largest.
Jason Kennedy found Four Franc Audio feet, “made the bass sound fuller, increased the scale of image thanks to greater apparent dispersion and added depth to the image. It was an enlivening, opening-up effect that seemed entirely beneficial, as if the speaker had become a bit more refined. Three Classic feet did a similar job but revealed even more low level detail, dynamics, scale, and presence in the recording.”
Encouraged by this, Jason tried the Classic feet under a three-legged Rega turntable and, ·was hit by a sense of three dimensionality that was stunning, making the imaging genuinely tactile and adding weight and substance to the bass. I particularly enjoyed the way they separated backing vocals from the lead on one track.”
Jason concluded, “The Franc isolation feet work and work very well. They are well built and finished to a high standard. If you want to get a better idea of what your system is capable of, what your music really sounds like, I suggest you give them a spin.”
HiFi+
Reviewed in Issue 201
Franc Audio Accessories
Reproduced from HI-FI+ Issue 202 www.hifiplus.com