What’s your vote for the most ridiculous, overpriced, and useless tweak?

I slightly disagree regarding over-damping. A chassis can not be over-damped, it can only be under-damped. If you apply the wrong damping material, it can be under-damped at certain frequencies and amplitudes. That can be worse than no damping. If you apply the correct type of damping that uniformly and consistently eliminates all chassis resonance and vibration at all frequencies and amplitudes, then you have total damping, which is what you want. Why on earth would you want the chassis to be vibrating at all? Even worse, to be vibrating only at selected frequencies?

Converting vibrational energy to current and then heat in situ is a more instantaneous and effective method of dealing with the problem of vibration, than any isolation method. As long as all frequencies and amplitudes are dealt with consistently.

Unwanted vibrations will bounce and reflect throughout a component chassis many times before exiting via the earth or the atmosphere. You don’t want that. Kill ’em fast. Convert them to heat on their first pass.

For a component the damping should be applied to the transformer, capacitors and in the case of a CDP the transport mechanism. Damping the chassis is not a bad idea but doesn’t go far enough. Besides, due to the ineffectiveness of damping materials for very low frequencies, I.e., 0-20 Hz, vibration isolation is required. It would be a good idea to isolate all the printed circuit boards from the transformer or even remove the transformer. The bolts holding the transformer should be loosened or removed. It is one of the worst ideas ever to directly couple the transformer to the chassis. Other than for shipping or moving there is no reason for the transformer to be bolted to the chassis. Put springs under it.

Since the entire building and everything in it is moving right along with the seismic type vibration, the chassis is still vibrating (at very low frequencies) even after you did the best you could with damping. Since the resonant frequencies of the CD laser assembly, turntable cartridge, tonearm and platter are very low i.e., 10-12 Hz, only isolation techniques will be effective in reducing their being excited by very low frequency vibration. By isolation techniques I mean mass-on-spring or mag lev. As I oft opine, a thorough and effective plan of isolation and resonance control is required.

Getting back to the subject for just a second I actually don’t see why some cable elevators cost an arm and a leg as suspending/isolating them with fishing line from eye 👁 hooks in the ceiling would accomplish the same thing or more by isolating the cables from electric static fields AND vibration. There’s always Statue of Liberty souvenirs if you must have something on the floor. 🗽🗽🗽

I’m going to help you guys out a little bit. Here’s some food for thought regarding iconic audiophile tweaks that might possibly be a tad overpriced. You decide.

Schumann Frequency Generator from Acoustic Revive $800

Tiny Little Bowl resonators set of 3 in pure gold, platinum and silver $3000

Minus K Isolation stand $3000

Vibraplane isolation stand $3000

Furutech LP demagnetizer $2700

It would be a good idea to isolate all the printed circuit boards from the transformer

There are a variety of anti-vibration grommets and stand-offs that can be used with a pcb.
Steve McCormack uses the anti-vibration stand-offs and he placed the large Plitron toroidal transformer in my DNA-2 LAE on a metal plate that was then isolated from the chassis.