Vibration Control

I follow the damping/isolation prowess of Angela Gilbert Yeung, but long before that I started damping everything. Transformer isolation is a biggie, for sure. The top panels of gear are very "ringy" and "reverberant" sounding. Damp them with a Dynamat type material and you will be surprised that the component will now sound quieter and more resolute through your system. Oh, I have been damping speaker horns for over 50 years now. My best, MrD.

observe the paper read out from a seismograph. all those squiggly lines. now add resonance feedback from playing music over the top of that. now add any industrial noise, or traffic noise, or waves or even airplane noise.

all those things are the resonance noise floor of your system, and that is adding background noise to whatever you hear. so it subtracts from the purity of the music reproduction.

it effects the racks, the electronics, the cables, the sources, and the speakers. might be more obvious and easier to understand in a turntable where the stylus is reading vibrations, but it's effecting everything.

you can eliminate almost 100% of that.

and electronics are definitely affected by that noise. the noise reaches your speakers as distortion. and that distortion locates the sound as coming from your driver, instead of from the music in the soundstage. so it lowers the realism. lowers the immersion of the music. adds an edge, masks detail.

@mikelavigne +10

Mike

I know that most everything can matter in an even decent mid fi system & noise is a real enemy of high level resolution. That said, how does minimal physical vibration create noise in a solid state electronic circuit? Any EE’s out there who understand & appreciate good audio systems??

I find this subject quite frustrating if not maddening.  It would be easy to demonstrate whether or not vibration control is necessary or not with a variety of solid state components and yet... I've yet to see this happen.  I mean, how hard is it to put a PA speaker in front of an amplifier and measure the effects, or lack thereof? 

A long long time ago I owned a Radio Shack phono preamp.  It literally rang like a bell.  Probably due to cheap ceramic caps, but besides that singular piece of gear I've never heard this happen again nor have I seen it demonstrated in solid state gear.  What if, for instance, vibration testing led to better component selection?  Or what if we found out it doesn't matter below 150 dB?  We may never know because  any testing in this field has not become apparent.