What does Grade 3 mean?
"Grade 3" is this ball's pedigree: it means that the ball meets guaranteed tolerances of an incredible 3 parts per million, or better. There is no higher grade available at present. Symposium is always striving to improve our products and services; the power and beneficial effect of the Grade 3s makes the long hours and hard work we put into perfecting the Rollerblock well worth the effort.

Why Bother?
Spending just a few minutes listening with a set of Grade 3 Superballs in your Rollerblock set will forever answer that question! You'll hear even more detail without harshness or "edginess," more soundstage air, superior extreme low bass impact and definition; in short, imagine any of the Rollerblock's impressive qualities, and take those to the next level. The Grade 3 pushes the "state of the art" performance of the Rollerblocks by an order of magnitude, or more. That's the incredible advantage of the Grade 3!

What will I hear with Grade 3s that I don't hear with my regular Tungsten Carbide balls?
More air, more detail. More musical "sweetness." A greater ability to visualize and hear instruments as individual entities, rather than sonic parts. A dramatically wider, deeper, and larger soundstage. And a surprising advance in extreme low bass performance. And, while it may sound like a cliché, you will hear "hidden" details and instruments on your favorite recordings you didn't even know were there.

...the Grade 3 Superball is the most perfect tungsten carbide ball possible with present day technology, and makes an almost "perfect" bearing...

How does the Grade 3 make this possible?
The Rollerblock, like any "ball bearing" isolation device, depends primarily upon a few key aspects of bearing design for good performance: the degree of "chatter" (or bearing noise) generated; and the uniformity of ball rotation. The near-perfect quality of the Grade 3 means that its surface is extremely uniform- so good, in fact, that Grade 3 balls are slippery to the touch. Interfaced with the mirror-smooth surface of the Rollerblock's cup, the Rollerblock's already very low chatter is vanished to practically non-existent levels, making an almost perfect bearing point. This aspect of bearing-isolation engineering is primary. Without a perfectly quiet bearing, the device (if intimately coupled to the component) will actually add noise (and thus distortion) to the component's output, which, since it is usually in the high-frequency range, will be heard as a "brightness" or "forwardness." This may initially be perceived as an increase in definition, but it is actually an increase in distortion. Eventually, on truly high resolution systems, poor bearings will yield unlistenable results. Leaving them in one's system creates more problems later, as one tries (in vain) to "compensate" for the extra brightness, since the only way to do this is to reduce the overall definition of the system (you cannot "equalize" for randomly generated noise- you can only remove it at its source!). The sad result in these situations is that one is now gravitating toward euphonic coloration instead of toward musical transparency- that is, in the wrong direction.

The Importance of a Well-Rounded Existence
Everyone understands the importance of tire balance on an automobile: enough velocity and enough improperly-placed mass can have deadly results at high speeds. While there is no life and death issue (we hope) in high end audio and video applications, the importance of balance in a bearing isolation device is of paramount importance. As lateral vibration occurs, the bearing isolation device's body slips and its ball (or balls) rotates. How well the system can isolate and dissipate (as work) lateral vibration is directly related to how fast its balls can rotate and respond to tiny amounts of lateral displacement. In this function, the quality of the ball is akin to the diaphragm speed of a very fast tweeter in its ability to correctly reproduce high frequency waves, although the ultimate function is opposite: in the tweeter's case, it is making waves, and in the Rollerblock's case, it is absorbing them. Any departure from perfection in roundness will cause the balls to "wobble," and will also create disparity between the rotation rates of the different Rollerblocks. Each of these results of imperfection in roundness has its own damaging effect upon the job of the bearing isolation device. Wobble in the ball's rotation causes additional vibration, which is in turn transmitted through the system, just like the vibration caused by a car tire that is out of balance. The Grade 3 ball's nearly perfect roundness practically eliminates bearing "wobble" or non-linearity of motion. This reduces vibration further and makes for super-quiet and extremely linear behavior. Further, any ball-bearing isolation system with more than one ball (the Rollerblock system exploits the minimum number possible - one per device, for a minimum of three in establishing a plane) is affected if each ball is not absolutely identical in size. Imagine a system with three different diameter balls: each, for an equal amount of lateral displacement, rotates at a different speed. These different rotation rates induce directional "prejudices" and skew lateral motion. Thus, it is important that all the bearings be as identical in diameter (size) as possible. Diameter precision is another vital aspect of the Grade 3 Superball: if the diameters of different balls in the same system are different, the rotation rates will be different. If the rotation rates are different, the different balls will, in effect, "fight" each other and constrain each other's ability to move freely and quickly. The super-uniformity of each of the Grade 3s minimizes problems in this area, and contributes to how the Grade 3 and the Rollerblock achieve their unparalleled levels of performance.