Do equipment stands have an impact on electronics?

dlcockrum
416 posts
11-02-2016 11:57am
Hi geoffkait,

Good discussion (mostly) on reducing/eliminating external vibration. What about internal vibration of components? I may have missed that earlier in the thread or elsewhere...

Best to you geoffkait,
Dave


We have covered internally produced vibration earlier. Even this morning I mentioned it somewhere along the line, when I mentioned damping the top plate of an iso stand and using extremely hard materials to evacuate vibration rapidly from the system.

Turntable motor noise, CD transport motor noise, transformer noise, capacitor noise, things of that nature can be addressed by damping techniques such as constrained layer damping. But for very low frequency seismic type vibration means other than damping or even Coulomb friction must be employed. Enter vibration isolation!

have a nice day, Dave

Thanks Geoff. I did indeed miss that and appreciate you backtracking for me. I will go back and reread the early posts.

I recently added Symposium Svelte shelves (constrained layer damping)and ridged steel footers with HF transducers under my SACD player, preamp & its external power supply. The improvement in image stability/specificity, soundstage width, and bass tautness is noticeable and satisfying.

Coincidentally, I mentioned to another audiophile friend of mine that we used an air table sitting atop a huge slab of granite underneath the electron microscope we used to perform ASIC post-mortums in my electronics manufacturing division and suggested that he consider an air table underneath his digital source in his ultra-high-end system. His response was that that type of vibration-control technology was extremely outdated. I begged to differ and we ended that discussion by agreeing to disagree.

My lead-and-sand-filled rigid-steel Sound Anchors component stand sits on cones atop my home’s concrete slab foundation and I can easily feel vibration sympathetic with the sound by placing my hand on the stand. As you say, rigidity, mass damping, and direct coupling are obviously not the complete answer to vibration management.

Best to you Geoff,
Dave

Dave wrote,

"Coincidentally, I mentioned to another audiophile friend of mine that we used an air table sitting atop a huge slab of granite underneath the electron microscope we used to perform ASIC post-mortums in my electronics manufacturing division and suggested that he consider an air table underneath his digital source in his ultra-high-end system. His response was that that type of vibration-control technology was extremely outdated. I begged to differ and we ended that discussion by agreeing to disagree."

When you say air table I trust you mean airspring table. Things are more complicated than I’ve let on, aren’t they always? and any type of iso stand can be tricky if one wishes to obtain the best possible performance. That’s why isolation is an art as much as a science. For example, some air spring have more internal damping than others. Minimizing the number of airsprings improves performance all things being equal as does selecting proper means of interfacing the component to the top plate and interfacing the stand itself to whatever surface it sits on. As I also already mentioned different types of isolation can sometimes be mixed, providing additional gains in performance. Of course the spring rate of whatever steel springs or air springs are employed must be matched to the load of interest.

dlcockrum

... My lead-and-sand-filled rigid-steel Sound Anchors component stand sits on cones atop my home’s concrete slab foundation and I can easily feel vibration sympathetic with the sound by placing my hand on the stand.

Really? That's simply amazing! Are you talking about just low frequencies here, or do the sympathetic vibrations feel like they span a wider range?

When energy is applied to soft spongy materials that are used in combinations with springs supporting a loudspeaker, everything supported remains in a state of continuous motion. By doing so, this negates the operational efficiency of a voice coil as the coil itself becomes subjected to this secondary flexing. Ultimately, the voice coil drives the entire speaker assembly and has to overcome the added inertia presented by the motion of the springs and soft materials upon which the cabinet rests. The constant motion and flexing with this type of isolation device manifests inefficiencies within the operational design of the voice coil. Tom. Star Sound Technologies