Does anyone use wood for vibration control?

So OP, I’m ready to do some listening. Yesterday I put on "Toys in the attic" by Aerosmith. This is a regular off the shelf CD and I’m playing it on my favorite CDP, which happens to be a very low mass player that Magnavox produced for several years. The system is totally mine with no brand names to mention except for mine, folks can check this out on the TuneLand Forum. I have my headphone setup cued up as well to do a few comparisons but this is mainly an in-room reference.

Most of my Tuning references are done with in-room systems because when listening I want to feel the music while I listen to it.

I use CDs for 3 reasons, one I love the sound of them, two a CDP is easy to tune and 3 the repeat button. For more serious referencing I might listen to the same recording for days leaving the player on repeat.

mg

I’m going to make some adjustments on the system, not because the music sounds bad, but to show how easy and effective Tuning Blocks and other wood pieces are when used.

People have already mentioned several types of wood and so this is in addition to their uses. I usually don’t like doing the better or worst thing, that’s up to the listener. What I’m here to do is show the variables of Vibratory tuning. Before I jumped in I knew others would come up to give their experiences, or quote others, shoot in the dark or share their own listening experiences that were successful using wood.

I look at the entire house or building as part of the mechanical system. The 4 fundamental Interactions tell us that everything affects (interacts) with everything else. That’s a pretty simple beginning guideline "there is no real isolation on a moving, magnetically charged planet". The audio debates on this sort of thing are amusing but if you back away from the surface for very long and then return you will find yourself in a different location. We live in motion from the day we are born till the day we fold up our listening ears and move on.

One of the reasons why wood is so good for music is the way trees have been growing on our planet. A tree is the biggest live fiber that grows from beneath the Earths surface to the suns energy in a full range vibratory fashion. Trees grow in cycles as they reach out for the suns energy. They are natures watch like all natural materials. If you slice through a tree you will see natures cycles just like if you carve away the side of a mountain. It doesn’t take much to see that we are all living in time and all connected to, and a part of, energy.

mg

hope you don’t mind me doing this in several parts, works better for me

When I got into designing audio products I focused more on metals, shapes, springs and other methods and materials, and the longer I was exploring the more I ran into issues that I ended up calling "energy blockage". I found that there are three main parts to energy movement, flow, resistance and interaction. I also discovered that energy interacts with mechanical conduits that pass energy in a way that is interactive with gravity, weak force, strong force and electromagnetism. All this is easy to look up or you can come to TuneLand where we looked it up for you and we’ve written about forever.

When we look at a component or wire or any audio part it’s easy to think with our eyes and not think about the forces that make the system work. If we were to put on our "field & wave" glasses we would see a lot more going on than what our eyes are seeing alone. That space between us and those components and parts are full of interactive forces. If we looked inside those components we would see the same thing, and if we looked at a micro level we would still see the same thing, tons of interacting energy.

What do these forces affect in audio? Everything about audio falls right in the crosshairs of the 4 interactions. And these 4 interactions are in in-ter-change with the audio signal non-stop. You can change the interaction, you can convert it to another form but you can't get rid of it. Space inside of our atmosphere must stay in full mode. You're not going to create a black hole with no interaction when it comes to the AC of an audio system. When you make a change to the interaction you are also making a change to the sound. The sound (audio) is part of the interaction. There is no separation between audio and the forces, they are one and the same. If you take the forces out of audio there would be no sound.

mg

Ever sit there one day and listen and everything sounds great and the next day you listen and everything sounds horrible? Well besides you changing everything else also changed. Go from a sun shiny day to a rainy one and back and you will get a good dose of audio interaction with the forces. Do the same from night listening to day listening, or seasonal listening or one of thousands of interactions and you will experience the system sounding different.

Want to know how much of the recording you’re actually hearing? The easy way is to go from the live room of a recording studio and listen and then go home and listen to see if the recording is the same size. If you do this most of the time you will be shocked at how much smaller the soundstage is from your home system as compared to your live experience, with the exception of close miking. In most cases you are maybe hearing 1/10 of the actual recorded info on a typical stereo setup (at any price). Ever sit there and am amazed to hear this incredibly huge soundstage that goes past any boundary in your room? You’ve probably just got a lot closer to the real size of the recording. How did that happen? The audio signal was more in-tune with the energy surrounding the info. Take that same recording around to your different friends systems and guess what. The stage might be as big on them but more than likely that same recording will be different sizes on each system. You can do this back and forth from system to system and you will find that some of the big stages on your system will be smaller on theirs and some of the big stages on theirs will be smaller on yours.

MG