Good questions and comments Terry. Damping the vibrations in a component, vibrations that the component may potentially add to the signal, is not "dampening (sic) part of the audio signal." Where in hell did THAT idea come from?! This idea that components themselves should be considered musical instruments, free to resonate, is SUCH an anti-high fidelity concept. Components should simply reproduce the sound of instruments (and voices) contained in recordings, having or adding no sound of their own. My God, that’s the first truth of hi-fi!
"Low mass frees the sound" and "High mass squeezes the sound" are just overly-simplistic bumper sticker slogans. Audio engineers don’t think in those terms. The high-mass VPI turntable platters (the purely stainless steel, the stainless steel/Delrin, and the aluminum/lead/Delrin) sound MUCH better than the low-mass acrylic platters. My Townshend Audio Elite Rock table has a plinth of a metal frame filled with bitumen pads and plaster-of-Paris, built that way so as to be non-resonant. Designer/engineer Frank Van Alstine suggests lining the inside surfaces of the wood bases of suspended subchassis designs (Linn Sondek, Acoustic Research, etc.) with modeling clay for the same reason. If high mass achieves low resonance, that’s a good thing. Of course, that too is an over-simplification, as there is the matter of resonant frequency, Q factor, etc.
