Does anyone use wood for vibration control?

Ever sit there one day and listen and everything sounds great and the next day you listen and everything sounds horrible? Well besides you changing everything else also changed. Go from a sun shiny day to a rainy one and back and you will get a good dose of audio interaction with the forces. Do the same from night listening to day listening, or seasonal listening or one of thousands of interactions and you will experience the system sounding different.

Want to know how much of the recording you’re actually hearing? The easy way is to go from the live room of a recording studio and listen and then go home and listen to see if the recording is the same size. If you do this most of the time you will be shocked at how much smaller the soundstage is from your home system as compared to your live experience, with the exception of close miking. In most cases you are maybe hearing 1/10 of the actual recorded info on a typical stereo setup (at any price). Ever sit there and am amazed to hear this incredibly huge soundstage that goes past any boundary in your room? You’ve probably just got a lot closer to the real size of the recording. How did that happen? The audio signal was more in-tune with the energy surrounding the info. Take that same recording around to your different friends systems and guess what. The stage might be as big on them but more than likely that same recording will be different sizes on each system. You can do this back and forth from system to system and you will find that some of the big stages on your system will be smaller on theirs and some of the big stages on theirs will be smaller on yours.

MG

When you get to the place in your hobby that you start to realize the audio signal’s interacting with every thing around it a new hobby begins from that point on. Most people I see going down this new path usually go the dampening route for a while because the changes are so obvious. After a while though they start finding that they can’t play as many recordings as they once did. The system will sound very detailed and musical on some recordings but far less forgiving on others. First thing we want to do is blame recordings but in time we’ll do something that gets us thinking more. Usually we’ll get to a place where we realized we have been cutting out parts of the recorded signal by squeezing the life out of the mechanical pathway. When the reality hits we start to understand that the audio signal and the physics of everything around and through it are actually a part of it. That’s when it’s time to take a look at the sound of wood and what it can do musically to the system. Rubber squeezes, metal sends but wood has a balance to it that is fuller range. The wrong fuller range can be disaster and the sound can get pitchy sounding on you quickly. Super hard woods are going to sound more like cones but can be tricky. Using a combo of cones springs and wood can be pretty cool once you figure out how to avoid field distortion. The possibilities of voicing your audio signal is endless but it doesn’t happen over night and more than likely you are going to get stuck a few times till you figure out how to tune the three parts to your system in harmony (electrical mechanical and acoustical). For this reason I usually start with a wood type that is fuller range and work on voicing the sound of that wood.

Brazilian Pine

Western Red Cedar

Redwood

are all medium to lower tone woods and a safe starting place. Once you get the basics down then you can move more toward fine tuning. If you’re not going to go the full wood route yet or have a different material rack you might want to start with springs and play with wood slivers for the top of the spring and bottom. This will give you some tonal adjustability. You can also do the same thing with cones, a sliver of wood on top and one on the bottom.

MG