Sistrum or Neuance or...?

FWIW, I have Geoff's Promethean Base under my turntable, but use Ken's Neuance shelf as the top platform. I find them both to be exceptional products. The Neuance shelf was an improvement when placed under my Spacedeck on the existing rack. But moving the whole setup to the floor and adding the Promethean garnered a pretty significant improvement in performance. Hats off to both of these gentlemen.

Oz

Interesting post by Roy of GMA on the effectiveness of cones in dealing with resonances in the thread "Green Mountain Europa hupe" - sez that cones don't damp or transmit many vibrations.........This from a well educated designer involved in making speakers.

Sean & Tom, while I would agree with you that reducing the level of resonances or vibrations could make a system "sound" better, and I would agree that causing the resonance of any particular component to increase due to a failure to control the resonance, might increase its apparent amplitude, it strikes me that if you were to successfully eliminate all resonances and vibrations, externally or internally, you would have optimized the equipment's ability to deliver its maximum undistorted signal but you would not/could not have increased its actual gain. With all due respect to you Sean, neither you not Tom have actually explained (to my understanding) the mechanics (electrically speaking) of the phenomena of increased gain due to elimination of distortions caused by vibrations or resonances.

But I have enjoyed reading this very interesting thread (as well as a few others) on the issues involved in these controversial matters. Sean, thanks for your good faith contributions.

Newbee, I have spoken with the guys about this, and we are working on a "White Paper" to discuss all of these issues in depth, so that all can understand. It may take a little time, but we're working on it. We want people to understand this technology as much as possible. It is of no use to us for people to have misconceptions about our products.

Basically, it(the efficiency increase) amounts to less wasted energy in the component. We will address this in the White Paper. Please allow us the time for our engineers and staff to put this together.

Thanks, Tom. Looking forward to seeing it.
It's always easier to work up the nerve & coin to try some of these things when we have a better understanding of how they attempt to attack the problem.
Ultimately we have to trust our ears, but it's nice to narrow things down to gear with rational thinking behind it.
Sorting through all the marketing BS is what I think turns off so many to our hobby. Getting on a rant tangent here, but the Bose crowd has really done all of us a disservice that's resulted in generations now growing up without giving due to good music reproduction in the home. Anything that brings us closer to the music!
Spencer

Newbee: I don't know if what i was trying to explain was a matter of "increased gain" as much as a perceived altering of tonal balances and amplitude linearity.

As we all know, altering the tonal balance of a system can have us thinking that the the spl or "gain" of the system has been altered. In reality, the average spl could remain the same even though more signal is being reproduced in certain sensitive frequency ranges at the expense of energy in other less sensitive areas ( or vice-versa ). The "average" spl or "gain" of the system has remained consistent, but due to our ears' lack of linearity, our brain is fooled into thinking otherwise. Bare in mind that this is all a "guesstimate" as to what is going on, as i have nothing statistical to base this on.

Like a lot of other things, i would like to do quite a bit of testing and research in this area, but i just can't seem to find the time or motivation to get off the computer and get busy. I think that the use of calibrated test equipment like an accelerometer, spectrum analyzer and spl meter could really give us quite a bit of data to work with in this area. I have all the gear to do that with, but it's a lot easier to talk about it than to actually do it : ) Sean
>