Vibration - What are the Main Sources?

But what is he talking about in the rest of his comments? Airing personal grievances, paranoia? 

Would you like to see the letter from the Washington State Health Department dismissing the fraudulent complaints against my license by haters on this website? Would you like to see the letter signed by mijostyn, thecarpathian, edgewound, mapman, nonoise and jetter? The threatening one I received just before the Health Dept notice? If you think it is tiresome reading my digs maybe imagine if half a dozen nut jobs were obsessed with and messing with you to this extent. One of them brags about how he will keep coming back again and again, different user name, different IP address. Sound familiar?

There is even a thread, maybe you missed it, "Apologies Millercarbon" that these same lowlifes did their best to wreck. Go look at all the removed posts. Those are all the people named above. That is what I'm talking about "in the rest of my comment".

If at any point it turned out my enthusiastic recommendations for stuff that actually works, don't actually work, that would be one thing. But no. My enthusiastic recommendations are virtually 100% corroborated with actual user experience. 

Tell ya what. When the day comes people like you start going after these others, reporting their off-topic posts and asking what is up with the constant stream of attacks on a guy doing a damn fine job of helping audiophiles, then my little digs will be completely unnecessary and cease immediately.

Until then you can expect these little reminders from time to time.

Seriously, you want me to post the letters again? 

Meantime: practice makes perfect.

A major source of vibration distortion is generated within the component itself. The entire audio signal is itself a vibration, oscillating back and forth positive to negative just constantly vibrating one transient after another. Everyone knows about the transformer that physically vibrates when there is DC offset. No one stops to wonder, why does the transformer vibrate? It is after all just electricity going through it.

So we only notice when it gets real loud and annoying. But the same thing is happening all the time everywhere constantly the whole time the component is turned on. Not just in the transformer either. Everywhere there is a music signal, there is vibration.

People tend to be real superficial and see only the obvious. Speakers vibrate- it must be the speakers! https://youtu.be/eXRM3lFRwRI?t=3

We need to look a little deeper. The real detail we are looking for in recreating music is extraordinarily fine low level detail. The smallest squiggles on a record are on the order of the size of a large organic molecule. Even by the time they are amplified to a very high volume level still it is not enough for anyone to see a tweeter moving back and forth. Yet it is.

Same thing in our components. They all vibrate, even supposedly no moving parts DACs, preamps, and amps. If speakers are the problem then why does vibration control work with headphones? Riddle me that one, Batman.

So the whole component is vibrating. There are a couple ways we can deal with this. One is try and control it at the source. That is why so many expensive high end components use beefy construction, thicker circuit boards, and so on. This is a form of vibration control. You can also apply materials like TA-102 fO.1 tape inside, directly on the chassis, boards, caps, etc. This works great. But too much trouble and risk for most to bother.

We can use things like cones, spikes, various footers, mass loading, shelf and rack construction, etc but all these things really do is shift or channel the vibrations into resonating at different frequencies. Some try and shift this into ranges we are less sensitive. Lots try and fool us into thinking the ringing we are hearing is actually improved detail.

Lots and lots of them work exactly this way. Almost all in fact.

The exception, other than super expensive laboratory gear, is springs. The ringing so many misinterpret as detail is actually component vibrations going into whatever the component is sitting on, exciting that material to vibrate in sympathy, which then in turn vibrates right back into the component. The component, the shelf, rack, floor, the whole system is then vibrating, ringing. You can see this quite clearly on the seismograph iPad in this video. https://youtu.be/7ew4dRUEm-k?t=30

Please note where he says this is a concrete floor. So much for the idea concrete is some magic solution. It is not. All concrete does is channel the vibrations and transmit them faster than other materials like wood. There is nothing special about concrete. In fact it rings a lot worse than wood! Don’t take my word for it, watch the video. DYODD.

Putting the component on springs does not prevent anything from vibrating. What it does do is isolate the component from its environment. This has two very important benefits. First, it allows the vibrations generated within the component itself to be dissipated within the component itself. This greatly reduces vibration distortion by eliminating ringing interactions with whatever it is sitting on. And secondly, it isolates the component from vibrations generated elsewhere in the room, such as by the other components.

Speakers benefit hugely because they obviously generate the largest amplitude vibrations. Large enough to excite the entire room into vibrating resonant behavior. This is something that is very hard to appreciate until you put them on some Townshend Podiums, then it instantly becomes very obvious. A surprisingly large proportion of what people consider acoustic or "room problems" is in reality due to mechanical vibrations from the speakers exciting the floor, walls and ceiling.

So there you go. Maybe one of the haters is having second thoughts and might want to get off the silent treatment and join the civilized world. Go through all my posts, organize them by subject matter, send me the spreadsheet or whatever. Do a good enough job I may even cut you in on a slice of the profits when we turn it into a book.

May. I did say "may".

This is the simplistic view: the only vibrations that count are the ones big enough to see and feel.   

Sorry. Wrong.

Is it possible people do not know the first thing about electricity? It is generated by moving a wire through a magnetic field. It's a fact. You could look it up.  

Move a wire through a magnetic field and you get a current moving through the wire. Vibrations are, and you could look this one up as well, moving.  

So vibrations most definitely do affect electrons. 

mglik-

The two obvious and central components needing vibration control are the TT and speakers. IME, other component also benefit but the improvements are more subtle. 

That's what I thought too. That's why my first component to get Pods was my turntable. Makes sense, right? Took some time for John Hannant to talk me into trying them under my tube amp. When I did, what a surprise! The improvement was somewhat different but at least as great as under the turntable.   

The difference was with the turntable the vast majority of improvement was in the area of resonance control. A huge amount of coloration, that had not even been audible, was removed. Every instrument sounded so much more distinctively like what it really is. Audiophiles love to talk about hearing the differences between guitars, all these little sonic signatures that tell you what is what. Dynamics got a little better, details, blacker background, all that. But the bulk of it was in the area of truth of timbre.  

Under the tube amp this was reversed. There was a big improvement in truth of timbre, but an even bigger improvement in dynamics! That amp just seemed to come alive with Pods! So I kept going and tried the phono stage. Same thing. The phono stage was sort of in between the other two, a more even improvement across the board, no one area standing out like with the amp and table.  

Now at this point I have already put springs under the power conditioner and subs, about the only thing left is the motor controller.  This has been on cones for years. This was also the least responsive of all my components, to all kinds of tweaks. They worked, just not nearly as much as elsewhere. Now with all these leftover springs I decided to try them and much to my surprise the improvement was about as good as under the other stuff! So I played around a little more, and now it is on Pods. 

It may well be that my system is so much more resolving now than years ago things that would barely have registered are now as if viewed under a microscope. For sure Moabs made a huge improvement, but there's a lot more than that. Anyway, that is pure speculation. Only thing I know for sure, vibration control, when it is done at Townshend Pods level works really good under everything. 

perkri-

Timely subject!

Getting close to final set up of my TT.

Just made a base - 3/4" mdf "box" filled with sand.

Excellent.

The TT weighs just shy of 60lbs, the base is approx 25lbs

Very similar to mine. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367   

My thinking is this. The vibrations present in the component needs to go somewhere.

Actually they need to be prevented from going anywhere.

The vibrations in the environment need to be prevented from getting to the component.

Springs do both.  

The component should be coupled to something the vibrations can dissipate to. The whole thing should be decoupled from the "world"

The idea is the component itself will dissipate vibrations faster. 

So I’m looking to put roller blocks between the TT and the base. It will both couple the TT as well as allow for horizontal movement.

Then, I’m thinking either ISOAcoustics pads under the whole thing, or, springs. So many sources for springs around that can serve virtually any purpose, and are inexpensive. Just need to find springs that are the right diameter (so they are stable), the right height (again, so they are stable) and the right spring rate so the whole unit floats. Meaning, the same force is required to "lift" it as is required to "push" it a given distance.

IsoAcoustics have been compared to springs and Pods. Search around, several have upgraded from IsoAcoustics to Pods or Podiums. The improvement is huge. IsoAcoustics cost a lot more than ordinary springs but are hardly any better. Maybe not any better at all, if the springs are carefully selected and tuned to load.  

You can search around and find plain springs on line. It is a tremendous amount of work, and if you guess wrong there is really not a lot you can do about it but try again. If you want to go this route let me know, I have a small selection you can probably find what you want. But I wouldn't recommend it, not unless maybe you just love doing things the hard way.  

That is why after a few tests I switched and started using Nobsound springs. They are just as effective but a whole lot more versatile. They can be adjusted for just about any load from 20lbs to over 150lbs simply by changing the number of springs. 

Nobsound work so well they are end game for a lot of guys. If you want another huge bump in performance then go to Townshend Pods. Whether they work best under the sand box or between that box and the turntable will depend on the details. Study mine, and by the way the top shelf is a sand bed in cast concrete with granite on top of the sand. Pods between the granite and the BDR Source Shelf isolate the turntable. Very similar to what you are doing.