I Have Airborne Feedback And Never Realized It...Till Now


  While my ZYX Airy is out for a rebuild, I hooked up my CAL cd player/transport and started playing CD`s that I had recorded from vinyl using a Tascam 900.
When I do the recording, nothing is on but the TT setup and the recorder. Room is dead silent. No speakers

I`ve  been listening to a disc or two over the last few nights.

Last night, I was listening to a CD I made of Lindsey Stirling`s 'Shatter Me' LP
I was hearing so many odd/different sounds that I never picked up on before using the TT.

For example, I heard growling sounds (seriously) back ground noises and other THINGS that all were hidden when I was playing the TT.
This LP is Bass Heavy! Lots of energy in the air. With 3 15" subs I know that.

My TT is pretty much isolated IMO
I use a Rega wall mount bracket that is bolted to my equipment rack not the wall.
I have the TT sitting on a SRM isolation platform that sits on the Rega bracket
Concrete slab floor.

No doubt the cartridge is picking up on all energy that and resubmitting it.

This won`t be an easy fix I`m afraid..  :(



scm
Have to say the Townshend guy’s videos make an awful lot of sense. MC is making a lot of sense on this too. Slap your table on one of those platforms and I bet most problems go away


Right. Here's some more common sense. 

Ever notice how you can hear the music even without the turntable being hooked up or anything turned on? The stylus tracking the groove causes the whole cartridge body and arm to vibrate so much you can hear it.  

It's not that airborne vibrations aren't making it back into the signal. They are. It's that they are orders of magnitude lower in amplitude than the mechanical vibrations already going on. The sound you hear tracking a record are mechanical in nature. You hear the sound, but the source of the sound is mechanically tracking the groove.   

Still more common sense. Airborne vibrations are super easy to deal with. You can hold a 5 gal plastic bucket over the table, this all by itself will eliminate the majority of the sound reaching the table. Add a little acoustic damping material, drop what's left 90%. People talking about a whole different room simply are not thinking things through. All you need is a good dust cover. But one that is not mechanically connected to the turntable.  

I would take a large plastic tote, big enough to cover the whole turntable, line it with OC703. Cut some strips of OC703, place them on the rack. Set the cover on the strips. This will seal the table off from airborne vibration, while the strips will decouple the tote from the rack and the turntable. This will be the equivalent of an isolation room for the turntable. 

Make it big enough so when you get Pods or a Podium for the turntable you can still use the acoustic cover, and you will have a really sweet isolated rig.
My two öre.
There is calculations regarding tone arm mass, cartridge weight, compliance and so on.
That is for calculating the match between the cartridge and tonearm.
The calculation gives you a low Hz number as output. That is the resonance frequency that the whole assembly.
You want that frequency be out of the hearing range. If you are unlucky maybe you have not as optimal match there.

Second thing is that you can also stand and jump in front of your TT if you turn of the subs. What I trying to say it is not much worth if someone is telling that they can jump beside their TT IF they do not have subwoofers that that play easily down to 10Hz and doing that with some extra dB (not a -3db reading)

With your 3 15" subs you can get into that situation.

So first thing is to check your cartridge and tonearm. If that is a issue try to fix that so you get a frequency in the proper range. (We can’t work against physics).

Then there is unfortunately something called rumble filter that is a hi-pass at somewhere 15 - 20hz (depending on the above).

I implemented that in my miniDSP with a 24 oct/dB slope. (The miniDSP is in my opinion to noisy but therefore it is only used to my two 18" subwoofers there it performs 6 different duties. And this is one of them.)

Yes rumble is a nasty feedback loop noise. So you need to have speakers that play low down with adequate of db to yours tonearm assembly resonance frequency if you do that and a tell is when you play a track put your fingers on the sub surround and you can notice it pumping in and out that is not in the music that is your feedback loop. (It is so low frequency that you don’t hear it and those frequencies is the one you cut out and stop the loop with the rumble filter..)
It is folly to spend a lot of money on any platform (many of them do not work) for such an inexpensive turntable. Buy a Sota Sapphire instead and all your problems will disappear.