I think Raul raised an interesting issue with airborne vibration. Even if a turntable and arm are isolated mechanically from whatever they are sitting on sound waves in air will tend to vibrate them exciting whatever resonances remain. There are many tonearms now with superbly damped arm wands. I think the best have permanent head shells with the exception of Kuzma. The main resonance that remains is the one that should be around 10 Hz. There is not much in music down there and a properly suspended turntable should be isolated down to 2-3 Hz. Anything above that will not get to the cartridge and arm by mechanical means. A well damped tonearm should not pass on any vibration in the audio band. So, in this situation a damping paddle in silicone can only affect the one resonance point. In the ideal situation there is nothing else to damp. It would seem to me then that if using a voluntary damping mechanism makes an improvement in the sound then either the turntable and/or tonearm are not correctly isolated or internally damped and there are now other resonance points in play. In which case isolating the turntable and tonearm from airborne sound waves might also make an improvement. But, if there is only the one resonance point, 10 Hz where not much happens nothing will improve the performance of the system other than perhaps changing the cartridge. A fixed turntable also has to contend with vibration passed on mechanically. A good example of this is the foot fall problem. Just because a turntable is on a granite slab does not protect it from all mechanical vibration and does nothing for airborne sound waves. I had some correspondence with Mark Doehmann creator of the Helix turntable. He is working on a dust cover system for the Helix that will isolate it from airborne sound waves. It is the final frontier for him.
Right now it is so heavy he will be using gas shocks to lift and counter balance it.
Right now it is so heavy he will be using gas shocks to lift and counter balance it.