TW Raven Acustic AC Owners

Dear Elinor,

Congratulations on your new turntable. It's an excellent choice and everybody seems to be more than happy with it.

I would suggest to look into Minus-K, SRA and HRS. I know that High Water Sound has used SRA and Minus-K at audio shows with great results. SRA has some sort of collaboration with TW-Acoustic, so I would feel confident that their products will perform well together. HRS platforms are ordered for a specific weight-range, which can be changed should you need to use the platform for another equipment. Minus-K offers state-of-the-art vibration control at an affordable price. Based on what I've read from their website, it seems to be one of the most efficient ways to approach vibration control.

Extra planning is needed if going with the all mount shelf alternative. Most cantilevering shelf-mounted structures under such heavy load will likely suffer from material fatigue over time. That means that all connections and all materials should be checked once in a while for wear and/or structural failure.

In a room built with with studs and sheet-rock, one has to take into a count that airborne energy becomes structural energy when playing at mid to high DBs. It's a well known fact in the US construction field that a sheet-rock wall needs sound insulation in order to prevent sound from traveling from one room into the other. The sound insulation between sheets won't prevent the wall from vibrating, but will prevent the sound from that vibration to go into an adjacent room. This type of construction is quite sensitive to changes in sound pressure, which will turn into vibrations. Therefore, in this particular case a wall-mounted shelf may do more harm than good.

Every type of wall structure will provide a different performance. If you have a concrete or masonry wall, then it's quite possible that a well conceived and executed wall shelf isolates well from mechanical vibrations in the room. But again, planning and execution are key for this to work successfully.

I've been using an HRS platform for about two years now and it works extremely well in my room. The other choice I seriously consider because it has superior technology, is the Minus-K BM-8 platform.

Regards,

iSanchez

I am intriqued by the Minus-K platforms. They seem to offer some technological and practical advantages over the other platforms mentioned (wall-mounting is unfortunately out for me). However, after checking out its website site, it looks like the only Minus-K platform wide and deep enough for the 3-motor Raven is the BM-1, which is 9" tall and costs over $4000!

Alectiong,

This is a link to a Raven AC3 on a Minus-K platform and it looks like an BM-8 or 6, but it is larger. You may want to ask Minus-K which model this is. The image is at the bottom of the page.

http://www.audiofederation.com/hifiing/2006/RMAF2006/report/1500/part2/index.htm

Regards,

iSanchez

As a long time user ,since 1983, of Quad electrostats and Magnepan speakers with a Linn LP12 front end right up to 2001.

I never had to deal with sound pressure levels , foot falls yes.

Back then ,the Linn was one of the best tables you could buy on the planet.

A wall mount shelf was a must with suspended floors.
Back in the day resonant devices were in their infancy, remember Mod Squad tip toe's? I used them under my speakers and table to good effect.

By the mid 1980s I had added a home made sand box platform to the wall shelf,a idea thats been around for a long time.
This improved the music on the neutral side of things, easily heard through the Quads.
Vocals were even more life like to my delight.

A myriad of active variables are at play with in a system and room.
Taming resonates is just one of many that should be addressed which can have huge sonic pay offs.

Whether its a home made box with sand in it or a $20,000 plus turntable platform.
Experiment ,what ever works for you and your budget.

http://forums.avguide.com/viewtopic.php?t=3588
Please see the link above for diagrams and further explanations about AIR-BORNE and STRUCTURE-BORNE sound propagation.
Unfortunately, some posters without architectural, structural or acoustic qualifications presume to post fallacies.
If the brackets and bolts are sufficiently sized to accommodate the loads imposed, there will be no ' material fatigue' over time just as there is none in properly designed floor or roof fixing brackets and bolts.
Insulation placed in stud wall construction will NOT prevent sound from traveling between rooms. At best, it will REDUCE the sound but at only certain frequencies. Those below 200 Hz will effectively pass straight through the insulation.
It is the de-coupling of the wall-mounted shelves that (as shown in my explanations) is the salient benefit.
A properly executed wall-mounted shelf will NEVER ' do more harm than good' .
The only harm I can see is ill-informed uneducated pontifications posing as scientific fact.