High mass turntable owners -- What Stand?

Dave,

I recently built a sandbox type of rack for all my components. Picture this, if you can. 2 stands side by side. Each stand has 3 levels and is about 36" high. Each level is a 4" high sandbox containing about 50lbs of sand. These are made of MDF and painted gloss black. They are held together as a rack with 3" wide x 1" thick baltic birch posts (I actually bought a table top from Ikea and cut it into posts). Cones on the bottom of each post anchor them to the concrete basement floor. I use 3/4" baltic birch cutting boards from Ikea as the shelf placed on the sand. The wood is all finished using tung oil. Very striking and very heavy and inert.

However, my unsuspended turntable showed a marked thump when I knuckled the stand itself. I still needed some kind of isolation. I wound up using another 3/4" birsh shelf with some large diameter bubble wrap under it. This worked significantly better than many other types of isolation that I tried (rollerblocks, sorbothane, pucks and such). It's almost dead silent to the knuckle test now.

Please let me know if you come up with something that isolates better under the shelf.

Enjoy,
Bob

Bigbucks5: What Canadian made stand do you have under your Verdier? Is it a DIY model, or can one be purchased from a manufacturer/retailer?
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It is/was a commercially available stand.

Trying doing a search for audiostand

The Kuzma turntables I have here are each on SK Research shelves and three Thorp Audio Group (TAG) cones. The latter are massive stainless steel alloy cones shaped somewhat like Walker cones but have been found by others to be more effective. The SK shelves are 2" thick laminated Baltic birch plywood with some of the middle layer hollowed out and partly filled with lead and Kevlar pellets. MDF tends to suck the life out of the sound, as someone alluded to above. The Kuzma Reference with shelf and cones sit atop an SK rack, also built of Baltic birch plywood along with three TAG cones recessed into the bottom of the rack. Disclaimer: I am a dealer for the products mentioned.

I have used a Mana Reference under my Walker, Loricraft 501, and now Shindo Labs. I found a special Neuance shelf added a lot, but then found the Acapella Silencio far superior. Then I tried the Halcyonic Micro 40 active isolation base on the Mana; end of story. Expensive but clearly superior to anything I have heard.

Salectric,

Thanks for the responses. I ask, because in the near future I hope to acquire a new high-mass deck, and will need to adapt the stand I currently use which is a single shelf unit. I had my stand custom made by a welder, and it is essentially constructed of welded 2" angle iron, and follows a rough attempt at cloning a Mana type look, but of course in a much higher mass design. The stand weighs in at around 135 lbs, and sits on top of a poured fiberglass reinforced concrete basement floor. The stand was sandblasted, sanded and painted, and the "L"-shaped sections are dampened by high-density foam fill. Obviously, rapping on this stand produces no resonances whatsoever, but eventually I will need to consider something to increases its surface area, which means a shelf type thing. Since the stand was designed around my current table, and said table needs bottom subchassis access at all times, the deck and the stand have no intervening "shelf" type device. I am experimenting with 1.5" composite laboratory tabletop material, which is somewhat like Corian, but denser and flameprooof (actually it may asbestos impregnated which produces its own set of cutting difficulties). I am thinking of two layers of this material glued and pressed together with some type of elastomer type compound. No final thoughts as of yet, but I'm always curious what other people have tried, pondered or rejected. Good listening,

-Richard