Turntable - On the Wall or to the Floor?

You know that's funny that you mention this method. Years back, I remember reading an article...I think it was Stereophile...he talked about such a method, saying that the best possible isolation would be suspending the table in space. Did you read that back then?

Anyway, this won't work for me because the look here is old farm house. I'd probably get divorced and have to move out...wait...then I'd have a new space and...hah...hah!

But, in another room. The wall is best but if you keep it in the same room as the speakers, you still get airborne vibrations unless you acoustically shield the tt. Footfalls are a small problem compared to the airborne vibrations.

Another approach which may work for you is to strengthen the floor from beneath. If there is a basement or crawl space, it is not difficult to place a beam across the middle of the floor, one under the speakers, and one under the TT.

The beams should go perpendicular to the joists, and can be held in place with jacks which allow more or less tension to level and dampen the floor. This serves to reduce the natural reasonant frequency of the floor thus reducing vibrational displacement. It is a relatively inexpensive approach and if you are not satisfied you can retreat and try something else.

I did this on a second floor living room over a garage, and it worked extremely well. You could dance on the floor without any affect to the TT. I would also recommend putting the TT as close to a wall over a foundation or load bearing wall as possible, as this is where the displacement is the least.

Good suggestions and thanks. The wall is the easiest solution for me.

This thread was originally started because I was told by a manufacturer of wood platforms not to put it on concrete or a bearing wall because the sound is inferior compared to wood..so try to make the floor work!

You can try shelf materials that will allow you to tailor your sound a bit.

My TT is on a Target shelf, but I replaced the stock shelf with thick glass, and the TT is on a Ginkgo Cloud 11 platform. Before the Ginkgo, I'd used the original MDF shelf, and thought it sucked a lot of the life out of the sound (my TT has no suspension). Then I tried some Corian left over from kitchen remodeling. That was very "soft" sounding to me, but pleasing. Glass gave me a lot of energy (too much), and probably some ringing in the treble. Also, I was getting some resonance with the 4-subwoofer system I use. The Ginkgo worked wonders, and I'm very happy these days.

Just suggesting you might want to play around with different materials as well as shelving to optimize your playback.

YMMV, but HTH

Frank