Does anyone use wood for vibration control?

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

When you get to the place in your hobby that you start to realize the audio signal’s interacting with every thing around it a new hobby begins from that point on. Most people I see going down this new path usually go the dampening route for a while because the changes are so obvious. After a while though they start finding that they can’t play as many recordings as they once did. The system will sound very detailed and musical on some recordings but far less forgiving on others. First thing we want to do is blame recordings but in time we’ll do something that gets us thinking more. Usually we’ll get to a place where we realized we have been cutting out parts of the recorded signal by squeezing the life out of the mechanical pathway. When the reality hits we start to understand that the audio signal and the physics of everything around and through it are actually a part of it. That’s when it’s time to take a look at the sound of wood and what it can do musically to the system. Rubber squeezes, metal sends but wood has a balance to it that is fuller range. The wrong fuller range can be disaster and the sound can get pitchy sounding on you quickly. Super hard woods are going to sound more like cones but can be tricky. Using a combo of cones springs and wood can be pretty cool once you figure out how to avoid field distortion. The possibilities of voicing your audio signal is endless but it doesn’t happen over night and more than likely you are going to get stuck a few times till you figure out how to tune the three parts to your system in harmony (electrical mechanical and acoustical). For this reason I usually start with a wood type that is fuller range and work on voicing the sound of that wood.

Brazilian Pine

Western Red Cedar

Redwood

are all medium to lower tone woods and a safe starting place. Once you get the basics down then you can move more toward fine tuning. If you’re not going to go the full wood route yet or have a different material rack you might want to start with springs and play with wood slivers for the top of the spring and bottom. This will give you some tonal adjustability. You can also do the same thing with cones, a sliver of wood on top and one on the bottom.

MG