Active isolation; what can it do for music reproduction?

Each to their own effective application, re active vs passive.

My preference is to use passive as I’ve a slowly, over the years, gained a lot of experience in implementing it, and the other half of Teo Audio, Taras Kowalcyszyn, has forgotten more about such applications than I’ve ever learned. Seriously.

Taras, for example, has been brought in as ’The cooler’, in situations that no one else has ever been able to solve or figure out (understand). He is also the only one I know of, who for a commercial or industrial acoustics install, has guaranteed hard numbers, sometimes impossible numbers.. or your money back. (FYI, no one I know of guarantees acoustics installs re hard or written down numbers, especially in the bass register area.)

And this is him being brought in by a company that was probably the original isolation experts on this planet (in the actual history of the developed trade), as they were doing it in WWII for the military.

So if someone wants world class isolation, damping or acoustics in a space or place, I’ll put Taras’ skill set and capabilities against anyone or any corporation, in a heartbeat, and with my literal head on the line. Without even blinking.

Apologies for that plug, but he never toots his own horn, ever, and thus no one knows..and they mostly get horrid installs, when his are always beyond the pale. (One of those "Oh, the stories I could tell.." things)
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Back to the subject at hand, which is that active can, many times, be re-tuned to deal with various loads, whereas passive, if it is to be tuned as best as possible, tends to have a single 'best' loading scenario or target area/zone, and then all else is a form of subtle to gross drift from that 'perfection'.  It is possible to re-tune passive systems through a load range, though, depending on how the design of the specific device is implemented.

But when nailing it, a perfectly or close to perfect passive install is preferred to active in a pro market, as passive is (loosely) considered to have higher reliability in almost any case. EG, damping a large multi billion dollar bridge or building. Active no, passive yes and no known way past that, as simple is the way to go, that is more properly failsafe. This is not always the concern in audio, so active stands a chance to get into the mix, here.

i would not begin to talk tech with Geoff. :-)

horses for courses.

solutions are scaled to the target situation. not sure electron microscope targeted tools (the intended scientific use for these active devices) is appropriate for the uses Geoff refers to. but.......science and industry has chosen these active units over other choices. and their tools ’work’ for our High Fidelity purposes with a few modifications.

i’ve not heard anything do what the Tana active devices do in my system.

far be it from me to suggest that maybe better choices don’t/can’t exist. i will watch for Geoff to introduce his new LIGO spec isolation hifi product line. i think that maybe when we build our rooms we do some of what Geoff refers to here. for instance; depending on the distance from major sources of ground noise we might use sand or some other material under our concrete floors. as i’m in the mountains, away from highways, surf, or train tracks, on glacial till, away from any urban center, in the middle of 5 acres, in a separate building from my house.......6 inches of concrete did the trick. does this go as far as the LIGO approach? maybe not. but those factors are passive things we do to set the stage for our other efforts.

i agree with the associated equipment comments; the link i posted above to the Herzan tutorial goes to great lengths to address that issue. ultimate resonance isolation needs a comprehensive approach.

i am planning on suspending my speaker cables from ’half rounds’ with a series of bungee cords. i have the bungee’s and am looking for the proper ’half rounds’ that will work. i want something in metal or hardwood that fits into my system vibe. even though i can quickly A/B on and off and hear the active contribution i know it will improve, as my speaker cables are heavy and i know it’s damping the reaction performance of those Tana’s beneath my amps.

and there are passive components to the Tana shelves. which i did describe above.

so i’d say i have no issue with any of what Geoff describes.

For informational porpoises 🐬 only,

The description of the various isolation techniques used in LIGO, the Mother of all Isolation Techniques, 

https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/page/vibration-isolation

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica
Give me the right spring and I’ll Isolate the world 

Thinking about it from a scientific standpoint, the reasons for isolating a turntable are obvious and I have been using passively isolated turntables exclusively since the late 70's with one silly exception ( a Transcriptors).
There are two types of vibrational influences on turntables, structural vibration and air born vibration (sound). Both the SOTA and SME shield themselves from structural vibration down to 3 Hz with dampened spring loaded systems. The isolation platforms do essentially the same thing. Do they do it better? Mike thinks so but I am not so sure. The isolation platforms are limited to 200 Hz, the SOTA and SME are not. I can jump up and down right in front of both turntables without any effect on them. That is pretty decent isolation. I assume you can put something like a Clearaudio table on an isolation platform and get the same result...up to 200 Hz. Then there is air born vibration. On tables with massive sub chassis and platters air born vibration will have virtually no effect. The problem will be exposure of the record, tonearm and cartridge. As far as the record is concerned both the SME and SOTA have excellent record hold down mechanisms that fix the record to the platter. Then there is the tonearm and cartridge. The dust covers I use give almost 6 dB of attenuation at 1000 Hz (measured with a meter) which is better than nothing. The best way would be putting the turntable in a sound proof room. The isolation platform does nothing for air born vibration only structural. Funny thing is that with new phono amps that have balanced outputs you can now put the turntable and phono amp at some distance from the preamp without ill effect making this a more practical idea and indeed if I ever build another house I might just design it with a turntable closet! So, IMHO the best way to isolate a turntable would be to get a well designed suspended turntable with a good record hold down mechanism and put it in an isolation closet. 
Next comes other electronics. The reasons for isolating a scanning electron microscope are pretty obvious. It takes several seconds for the microscope to complete a scan with resolution down to angstroms. The object being scan has to be absolutely still relative to the scanner or you get a blurred picture. It is a purely mechanical problem not an electronic one. Does motion or vibration affect electronics in any way? You could argue that mechanical devices like switches, relays and mechanical contacts might be affected. You could argue that capacitors might be affected. Is there any evidence for this. Not that I can find. If anybody can find something on this please post a link. Can vibration affect the travel of electrons through anything else? Only in your worst nightmares. Imagine what the traction control in your car would do. Or the auto pilot in an airplane. IMHO anybody that argues that it does is not lighting up on all eight cylinders. 
What about people like mikelavigne who say they can hear a difference when they turn the isolation platforms off? I do not expect anybody to take for granted what I say I hear. That is entirely a matter of my perspective and psychological state at the time. If 100 people hear exactly the same thing at the same time now perhaps I can make a believer out of you. Whose brain (ego) wants to admit they just wasted 17 K on a lark? Maybe some day I will get to hear Mike's system and even hear what he hears. One good thing I can certainly say for Mike is that he does not sell these things which makes his assessment more valid even if he has the silliest looking amplifiers on the market:)  Never believe a human who is trying to sell you something. 

What about people like mikelavigne who say they can hear a difference when they turn the isolation platforms off?

i welcome skepticism.

just to let you know, last Thursday i had visitors to my room who asked me if they could turn those Tana active platforms off and see the effect, so i said go ahead. that was their viewpoint. there were 4 of us in the room at the time.

here is a link to those comments;

http://www.whatsbestforum.com/threads/taiko-audio-sgm-extreme-the-cr%C3%A8me-de-la-cr%C3%A8me.27433/page-64#post-603082

come on over anytime and hear it for yourself.

twice in the last year i had some local audio friends come over and check my own perceptions on the active Tana shelves prior to buying the last couple. i wanted to make sure i was not being delusional.

this is not any subtle feeling over days of listening. this is poke you in the nose obvious.

would the effect be as obvious in every system? of course not. my system is all about hearing everything. as i said above, this is the kind of thing you do when you have done everything else, and you have the optimal environment to get the most out of the investment.

and having 5 of these in the system increases the effect since any resonance feedback restriction is broken by removing one. so that’s a bit of a multiplier effect on turning one off. not saying you are accepting that, but that is what i observe.