Odd ideas. Good one. Made me chuckle. Thanks. You have much to learn, grasshopper.
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/sandbox-style-isolation
Between actually trying stuff however odd and trying to figure things out by reasoning alone I'll take trying stuff out any day. This site is chock full of the most horribly wrong ideas that sound good enough to have convinced people, almost always people who can't be bothered to actually check them out. So you're making mistakes but learning. Its the but learning part that counts. Good for you.
Like I said these things are all tuned. What you got is like an old grandfather clock that wobbles. Can't keep good time because every time the pendulum swings it causes the whole clock to sway, the whole thing rocking back and forth. Your turntable is doing exactly that, only at a frequency and amplitude that makes it hard to see. But that's what's going on. That's why your experiments failed. What you did was just like putting styrofoam under the already wobbly clock. It only wobbles worse and more.
Place that clock (or turntable) firmly in some nice packed down sand though, now its stuck. No more rocking.
Remember though its not only the turntable that moves like this. The whole rack, or wherever else you put it, everything no matter what is going to oscillate. Its simply a question of how much and at what frequency. Why electron microscopes require specialized vibration control. What looks good at one scale is a nightmare at another.
So on one scale you control the very fine low amplitude vibrations with the sand particles that shift against each other dissipating that vibration into heat. This requires only a fairly thin layer of sand. Mixing in oil actually helps keep the grains from packing solid while allowing them to shift microscopically, which is just what you want.
But you also want stability on a larger scale, like the shifting vibrations of your old house. For this you want mass. The more mass the more energy it takes to make it move, or the smaller the movement for a given input. Most people just use as much as they have space and time and money for. But you could work it out mathematically if you know the dimensions of your rack and enough materials science and physics.
So maybe not as odd an idea as it seemed at first glance.
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/sandbox-style-isolation
Between actually trying stuff however odd and trying to figure things out by reasoning alone I'll take trying stuff out any day. This site is chock full of the most horribly wrong ideas that sound good enough to have convinced people, almost always people who can't be bothered to actually check them out. So you're making mistakes but learning. Its the but learning part that counts. Good for you.
Like I said these things are all tuned. What you got is like an old grandfather clock that wobbles. Can't keep good time because every time the pendulum swings it causes the whole clock to sway, the whole thing rocking back and forth. Your turntable is doing exactly that, only at a frequency and amplitude that makes it hard to see. But that's what's going on. That's why your experiments failed. What you did was just like putting styrofoam under the already wobbly clock. It only wobbles worse and more.
Place that clock (or turntable) firmly in some nice packed down sand though, now its stuck. No more rocking.
Remember though its not only the turntable that moves like this. The whole rack, or wherever else you put it, everything no matter what is going to oscillate. Its simply a question of how much and at what frequency. Why electron microscopes require specialized vibration control. What looks good at one scale is a nightmare at another.
So on one scale you control the very fine low amplitude vibrations with the sand particles that shift against each other dissipating that vibration into heat. This requires only a fairly thin layer of sand. Mixing in oil actually helps keep the grains from packing solid while allowing them to shift microscopically, which is just what you want.
But you also want stability on a larger scale, like the shifting vibrations of your old house. For this you want mass. The more mass the more energy it takes to make it move, or the smaller the movement for a given input. Most people just use as much as they have space and time and money for. But you could work it out mathematically if you know the dimensions of your rack and enough materials science and physics.
So maybe not as odd an idea as it seemed at first glance.