A Copernican View of the Turntable System

T_bone,

Yes, that's the way it's set up now. Really impressed.

Good on you! I think getting a great result from experimentation is wonderful. I'm very happy for you that it worked. I'm going to venture out on a limb and say that you would not keep the same sound if you spiked the table and floated the armpod on the footers. I expect there is resonance in the TT you are dampening/sinking (the reason why people in plinth-world make bigger/heavier/better plinths for the SP-10Mk2), and the improvement on the armpod came from a) switching from blutack to spikes, and b) taking out the symposium (two isolation methods next to each other is usually worse than just one in my experience) - both of which should have improved things.

I expect that if you do not hear any issues with the fact that the table/platter is now theoretically resonating at a low frequency in relation to the tonearm pivot point, that the experiment has been successful. Once in position, the table itself has a great deal of inertia (in 3-dimensional space), which should help keep most of the resonance transfer in the domain of heat generation rather than low frequency movement. Remaining theoretical issues might remain just that - theoretical.

I have a couple of motors like that and some great footers made by Sony way back in the day. I could try that relatively easily if I could make an armpod. I'll have to think of a way to get one done...

T_bone,

Excellent and do let me know how it goes if you do try it.

Dgob, all elastomerics have a range of operation- a minimum loading and a maximum. Depending on where you get the elastomerics you can often get a datasheet that can be very helpful in this regard.

However, I did increase the weight of the armtower to over 6kg and this brought no major improvements - save stabilizing the imaging.

In my book, stabilizing the imaging is a major improvement! One of the weaknesses many 'tables have relative to analog tape is image stability. I really could not get my 'table to do that as well as tape until I installed the solid plinth (damping the original plinth, which was hollow-cast, was not enough!).

Atmasphere,

You're right, the spikes and resultant image stabilization was a major improvement. What I should have said was that it did not bring performance back to where I had it when only using blue tac and not using the Symposium. The combination of spikes and the removed viscoelastic platform has brought major improvements in this regard but I still need to test for any trade-offs and ensure where (if anywhere) weaknesses might now lie.

Onwards and upwards