Turntable stand, steel, aluminum,shelves of ?

Salectric,

The common thread seems to be the maple butcher block platforms that "gonners"seem to prefer.

The Sound Anchors stands with the pvc damping tubes are intriguing, I know nothing about them. I will check out their website to glean whatever a DIY guy like me can discover; after all, sometimes it is more rewarding to build something for $500 that you can buy for $250.

Thank you for your reply,

regards, Ken

Hey Ken,

Lloyd is a big fan of the Jatoba. As a matter of fact his personal rack and his personal amp stands are all made from it . The biggest difference is that while retaining all the positive properties of the hard maple he also advocates, Jatoba is a much denser wood than maple, thereby being even better as a shelving/racking material for audio. It is also farmed and harvested, not stripped from non-renewable forests the way some of the dense South American hardwoods are.

Keep us up to date as the project progresses!

Joe

Ken, The reactions to maple butcherblock are not all favorable. If you do a search of the archives on Agon or AudioAsylum, you will find a number of folks (including me) have found thick maple---3" in my case---to be too slow, thick and dead sounding.

There's just no substitute for trying it yourself so you can reach your own conclusions. However, judging from your system description, you're used to doing that anyway.

Good luck!

Dave

Salectric,

I spoke with the people at Minus K - WWW.minusk.com. you should check out their web site; they make vibration abatement platforms for atomic scanning microscopes and all the techno gear that the geeks use. They said, use only the platform that we supply, anything else may add a vibrational sigiature that will denegrate the ability of our device to reduce vibrational signals to whatever you place on top of it. If you need to add an additional platform it would be advisable to isolate it witha a material such as Sorbothane. However, interfacing your device directly to the platform of our device will yield the best performance

There would be romance to having a platform constructed of wood that was sourced from Noah's Ark, but since I'm still alive and kicking, I think I'll try their suggestion and mount the table directly on their platform. I can always fabricate a huge platform from whatever, and if it doesn't sound any better I can give it to one of my kids, as a chopping block, for Christmas.

When I decided to post this forum, I wondered what I might get out of the threads, after all, my mind was made up. I knew what I was going to build and how it would be designed. After the posted threads the design has been changed , thanks to your input.

I will keep those of you that have" CHANGED MY MIND" on what I was going to build and thank you for your thoughts.

Thanks, Ken

I took a different approach: Get phono front end isolated from listening area and use mass on the air suspension stand.

I use an Arcici stand loaded with mass: Basis 2500 signature with extra platform, MSB 1" laminated steel/alum./lead beneath it on the airhead. I've tried various woods, acrylic, marble etc combinations always hearing a bit of coloration. The MSB added no sound or coloration to the music. The Arcici design allows you to mass load the top of the Airhead by suspending 4 acrylic shelves via threaded rods. I have my VPI SDS, Aesthetix Io 2 PS Signature and PS Audio PS600 on the shelves. This approach produced wonderfu music. I thought this was great until I took the next step.

This whole setup is between two interior studded walls (29" deep with front and back access via doors) separating the living room (listening area) and dinning room from the family room. This perfectly isolated all my phono equipment allowed me to bring separate dedicated ac lines. 21' pair interconnects go to the mono amps behind each speaker. Now it really sounds fantastic.

have fun,
GerryM5