Your homemade tweaks?

I have a Technics SL1210 turntable. Out-of-the-box the turntable has an upper midrange glare, variously attributed to the servo frequency, platter ring, motor noise coming up the spindle, etc. etc. It's none of the above, but rather the resonant ringing of the tonearm tube, which has no foam or physical damping matter inside.

I wrapped mine in Teflon pipe thread tape and it cured it. You can get a roll for about $1.00, which will wrap a lifetime of tonearms. On mine I even wrapped the knurled twist collar that attaches the headshell.

This *really* cleaned up and smoothed out the sound, and the midrange glare disappeared.

Any hollow tonearm without foam stuffing should benefit from this.

What great ideas people! Let's keep them coming!

Best

Dave

Stereophile had a column called Fine Tunes , that ran for years , till J10 left . It was about no or low cost tweeks , I learned an amazing amount about tweeks and how to separate the good from the bad . Best column they had . I sill use there formula for mixing sand and lead .

Just one word viscoelastic. Like a tube in a signal chain insert anywhere and get the benefit.

My homemade tweak is using cardboard toilet tissue rolls as lifter for my speaker cables. These have been emptied the old fashion way. Which works like a form of burn-in for the cardboard rolls. So when they are used up naturally they are totally burned in. BTW I lay the cardboard rolls down so they can roll. The weight of your cables will keep them in place. My experience is that they do not work at all if you stand them up. They are called tissue rolls for a reason, so let them roll. One caveat with this tweak, make sure the insert is plain cardboard with no shiny coating on it. Avoid the whitish looking cardboard insert with the plastic laminated coating at all cost. It smears the sound. Some might think that I am full of #$%& with this post. But I do use this and it does work well in my system.