A Copernican View of the Turntable System

The arm pod I'm having made is roughly the diameter of the AT 616. When I get my TT back, 3 616's will go beneath the TT and 1 beneath the pod. Hopefully it works out. Before, I had the TT and arm board sitting on different isolation systems: TT on 3 AT-605 footers and arm on Herbie's tenderfoots. Sounded good to me--but maybe I'm hard of hearing.

Incidentally, while my TT is in the shop, I've been borrowing a Sony 2251. It sounded woeful at first. I almost gave up and on a lark put the tenderfoots beneath it. Much, much better. Pretty good table overall, in my amateur opinion.

@Chris: how did you put spikes beneath your sp10? I'm assuming there's a board in between? That is, the TT sits on the board and the board is on spikes? Or did you thread spikes directly beneath the chassis?

Of course, to chauffeur Garrett Morris' and the baby's relief, the rabbi was successful. I guess I will go back to maintaining radio silence. We now return you to our regular programming.

By the way, in the real world there is no such thing as "complete (mechanical) isolation", which is why I take the position that I take.

By the way, in the real world there is no such thing as "complete (mechanical) isolation", which is why I take the position that I take.

So when someone claims to have built an 'acoustically dead' plinth, claims of death are exaggerated? Or what does that phrase mean? Really, I don't know. Is it something separate from isolation?

If one can create an acoustically dead plinth for one's turntable (as a whole), then mutatis mutandis why couldn't one create separate acoustically dead plinths for TT chassis and tonearm? Does that mitigate the concerns regarding coupling? Or is that a method for coupling?

Too many concepts; too little knowledge (on my part).

Banquo,
The point of weighing down the armpod is to couple it to the surface below (which in turn should couple it better to the TT). Putting separate AT616s under the table and the armpod separately negates the effect of adding on the weight to the armpod. At least in the SNL case the rabbi and baby were 'coupled' to the same backseat. Your proposed method suggests the rabbi is better off leaning through a window of another car alongside. If it were me (and it is not), I would suggest putting all four footers below a rigid layer to which both TT and pod are coupled.

Your method may work in practice, but it will limit the improvement you get and increase distortion in other ways. First, if you put ONLY the TT on 616s and leave the armpod spiked, AND that is an improvement, it indicates the footers worked. If only the armpod was on footers, and the table were not, and that also improved things, either you have a separate component-led problem to the first one or you have the same problem of resonance coming into everything from below. If your tonearm is resonating, you need to fixt that separately. If it is resonance from below, you want your tonearm and table on the same decoupling platform or the different load presented by armpod and table vis-a-vis their respective isolations will cause weird distortions.