Hello 4yamx,
Hmmm, my impressions on CLD materials.... First of all we'd have to look at the application: plinth, platter, armboard, tonearm wand, etc..
I guess you were refering to the use of CLD in armboards.
Conventional("rigidly" coupled) tonarms depend upon the dissipation of energy (fed into their structure by the cartridge tracking the grooves) in the arm's structure itself and, to a greater or lesser degree, in the armboard(or plinth) they're mounted on. The use of a CLD armboard should help dissipating those vibrations more evenly, and when the right materials are chosen, more quickly, too. Every structure(tonearm) will exhibit different resonance characteristics, therefore armboard A might be better suited to accomodate arm A' while armboard B will be better suited to arm B' . To further complicate things, the resonance makeup of arm A', or B', and C'... will differ depending upon the cart used. By tightening cartridge screws like a maniac you only emphasize this phenomenon.
I use a CLD armwand for the No.2 arm(3layers), which helps to control armwand resonances, CLD effectivly cuts the peaks in the resonance spectrum(same for arm boards, etc..).
If you intend to build a CLD armboard, try to match the mechanical impedance of the arm's contact surface/material and use a "chaoticly" structured material as the second layer.
Certain types of woods are, for all intents and purposes just that: Randomly distributed hard/strong fibres imbedded in a softer compound with a large "lossy" interface area within the material itself.
MDF out to be a perfect material for this application, but it isn't: the individual fibres are too short.
Hope that helped a bit...
Cheers,
Frank
