Suspensions on turntable...really effective?

diamondears - Suspensions on turntable.......really effective ?

I think that the OP - diamondears is thinking about what type of shoes the turntable is wearing ? Women have this thing for shoes you know. But truth be told I think I do too. My SP10 MKII has worn maybe 15 sets of shoes during past bouts with audiophilia. Each set of 3 shoes transformed its’ personality each time. Yes, turntables have three legs. Well, they only need three legs. We have all heard the term "clothes make a man". How about shoes make a TT ?

Geoffkait
But we know that magnetic fields are bad for the sound especially in proximity to low level signals. For that reason I’m out.

Oh no....

Every low level signal phono cartridge consists of key components: the stylus, cantilever, MAGNETS, coils and body. What are we going to now GK......you better go tell every cartridge maker about this.

Now the platter itself on my La Platine is this big aluminum thing, and I think it isolates pretty good as it allows me to use a direct shot of unshielded phono wire.

Geoffkait Of course the other objection is the very slippery nature of the opposing magnets doing the levitating.

Well, I can tell you that La Platine is anything but slippery. In fact the opposing magnets provide braking action to deal with the records behavior, at the record location. Do any others do this ? Kinda cool. The distant motor happily provides pulses of power through loosely applied thread. It can be plucked while the record is playing, and so far no listening can tell I am doing it.
This is really fun to do with Audiophiles that are used to "loading" up the record, "loading" down with heavy clamped center weight and heavy peripheral weight; ready now, activate speed controller, ready, ok. push start ........at speed in milliseconds ......

La Platine - very much like a little girl pushing 6 - 200 lb guys on a playground merry go round.
hey its a unique experience - not for everybody.

sidenote
Audiophiles are immediately attracted to La Platine because all the family jewels are exposed, accessible, and they think..oh my .. so much to access and modify here.
The problem is ...from what I have heard .....true audiophiles all end up doing the same thing with her... they mess too much with the design...they go to far, and they then get bored because they have destroyed its genius dna, and created "audiophile bedlam".

You heard it here first.

Thanks for the responses, all. 

What I'm looking for is some white paper or really comprehensive post or thread discussing the merits (and demerits) of suspensions on turntables. 

Primarily, I'm wondering how spring suspensions could isolate from vibrations when the spring itself is still connected from one end to the other end? Re magnets, when the magnet moves, so does what's on top of it?

Diamonddears, I'm no mechanical engineer, but a spring has a resonant frequency (it's "rate"), above which it isolates whatever is sitting on it from whatever the spring itself is sitting on, and below which it does not---the mechanical energy passing right through the spring, un-attenuated. The isolation resembles an electronic filter, with a roll-off slope beginning at the center frequency.  A turntable suspension, therefore, should have as low a resonant frequency as possible, 3Hz being an attainable number. The lower the desired frequency, the "looser" the suspension, and the slower the table will bounce when pushed down upon. A table tuned to a low resonant frequency will have soft springs, like an old Cadillac. 

I could be wrong, but I doubt you could find any white paper specifically on turntable suspension. The audio industry just doesn't seem to publish that detail. You would have better luck looking into industrial products like TMC: http://www.techmfg.com/products/at_a_glance.html

As a designer of isolation devices since Jesus was a Boy Scout I would just say the spring rate in pounds per inch is related to the resonant frequency of the iso system by the equation, system resonant frequency Fr equals the square root of (total) spring rate over total mass. So the more springs employed the higher the total spring rate (the stiffer the suspension) and the higher the system resonant frequency. The way I obtained extremely low resonant frequency for my sub Hertz platform was use only one spring. Whaaaaat? Most spring systems are too stiff to be effective dealing with extremely low frequency vibrations that are the issue, the ones produced by footfall, traffic, the speaker feedback, Earth crust motion. Even iso systems that provide Fr of say 3Hz are not really that effective when it comes to dealing with extremely low frequencies since the iso system acts like a mechanical low pass filter and won’t attenuate very effectively much until the frequency of vibration reaches say 15 or 20 Hz. How to easily measure the Fr of the turntable suspension.  Push up and down on the (suspended) turntable and time the motion with a stopwatch to obtain cycles per second. 3 Hz is a relatively slow undulating motion.  A more rapid motion will be up around 8 Hz or whatever, which is too high to be effective against very low frequencies.