Component isolation

This s a great post...I'm really a novice trying to better understand the intricacies of damping and isolation, etc.  My takeaway is that there's no one solution, but rather a combination of solutions dependent upon one's system and environment.  A lot is devoted to reducing component internal vibration, which makes sense to me because its the closest to the signal path, sometimes actually in the path. 

So does room acoustic treatment come into play, in terms of reducing airborne vibration that can find its way into the audio signal? Can this vibration enter the cable or component and disrupt or alter the audio signal?

Probably a really stupid question, but like I said, I'm trying to learn first - spend later.

geoffkait14,385 posts03-20-2019 6:54amNot sure I go along with your detective work. Radio frequencies, like light, are not affected by magnetic materials or by charged materials. Photons, which comprise radio frequencies, have no charge. So, crystals by themselves or “charged crystals” would not make them RFI/EMI attractors or absorbers.

geoffkait14,365 posts03-19-2019 6:38amReverse piezoelectric effect is probably the operating principle.

Last night and early this morning while posting on Agon I was using my split screen tuning up a system on the other side of the world. I mentioned this here, I think maybe on this thread, don’t recall will have to look. While folks here were saying this can’t happen type of thing and "schooling me", way over in Asia here’s what I was getting back from a listener in real time.

I copied some notable posts for you.

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Yes yes yes sound so much more better!!!! More body more girth more bass. Wow damm this is huge! Difference is huge!!!! There better coherence to each note !! Yes they just need more wood more resonance this is truly a musical instrument. This is definately a new learning experience. Lol i feel like a kid !!! This it’s so crazy the change is huge now. Lol huge stage!!!!! I dropped the volume down by 2dB. This is crazy that attack and dynamics is perfect!!! The splash of cymbals is life like crazy good!!! Lol im lierally having goosebumps moment here !!! Yes this is a very different listening experience im getting now. Very involving and the presence is good. Beyond any thing in high end audio! The sound is very robust yet large and its dynamic swings is very good. I used it for jazz,rock and vocals and they just sound fantastic. Its more 3D and this time it fill the whole room front to back. It sounds big lol!! once i have got the full picture on your speakers with the platforms in and am able to sell the Arcs and sonus for a good price lol!! Theres no way the sonus can get this kind of sound its so lively and realistic. Im gonna go all out with this setup theres no need to look back too much of goodness here in the tune than in HEA lol!!!

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There was a lot more to the conversation but I wanted to give you a feel for what listeners go through converting from HEA to Tuning. Above were his words not mine. Last night we happened to be talking about the speakers, but there are other conversations about going from the ARC to a $300.00 unit.

What I’ve been saying the last few years "Is" happening in our hobby. Listeners (very top of the line listeners) are moving to variable tuning systems. These are serious listeners with no budget restraints. They purchased their dream systems and took them as far as they could to realize it’s not far enough. This is when they contact me and I work with them from the view point of how audio works and how they can get the sound they want. I don’t throw theory at them, and they do the work on their own without me being there most of the time. I don’t lead them by whispering in their ear, I simply make them the tools and guide them through the tuning. They tell me what they are hearing and I show them how to tune their setup. Most convert to a better setup while selling off their HEA components and speakers (their choice and idea).

This has always been very exciting for me to watch and now even more so because of the internet.

Michael Green

I'm sure as time goes on some of those Tunees will be coming here to share their experiences. When they do you can ask them directly. As for me I'm here to help them get started on their journey and design tools, where they take it is up to their own passions bdp24. While I listened with both JGH and HP we spent our time tuning and often making fun of the HEA. So my take on my friends may have also been different from yours.

as always, appreciating your points of view even if they do differ from my experiences

MG

Doug Sax had the best method of determining the transparency of any given piece of equipment---the bypass test. He would compare a live feed from his studio with the sound of the same signal passing through the device being evaluated. Any difference between the sound of the two was the component adding it’s own sound to the signal---aka distortion. The idea of high fidelity is to minimize that difference. Hi-fi components aren’t musical instruments, they reproduce them. The sound of musical instruments and voices contain timbres and textures; a hi-fi system should have none of it’s own. In fact, the less it has, the better able is it to reproduce that of instruments and voices.

It’s a very old dilemma: Do you want your system to reproduce the sound contained in recordings---whatever that sound may be, or do you want it to create sound you "like", regardless of the sound contained in recordings? J. Gordon Holt, the pioneer of subjective reviewing, argued for the former and against the latter. Harry Pearson’s standard was what he called, as we all know, the absolute sound---the sound of acoustic instruments in a real space, like a concert hall, cathedral, or even recording studio. But that construct relies upon the assumption of recordings containing such sound, waiting only for it to be reproduced. Very few recordings contain pure acoustic sound in a real space (in Pop music, virtually none do), yet Harry and his believers continue(d) to evaluate components based on their ability to create sound like that heard in those real spaces.

That is not so different from Amar Bose designing a loudspeaker that mimicked the 11% direct / 89% reflected sound heard in concert halls. That is imo an inherently flawed concept (recordings made in those spaces contain the direct and reflected sound; to play them back on the Bose 901 doubles the effect. For Bose’s concept to work, recordings would need to be made in an anechoic chamber). So imo is the notion of a hi-fi system itself being approached as a musical instrument, "tuned" to one’s liking. Minimizing the sound added by the system, on the other hand, is a noble pursuit. A hi-fi system (and perhaps I ;-) should not editorialize. The sound of the listening room is itself, of course, part of the system. Perhaps the largest part, along with the recordings. Minimizing the deleterious contributions of the listening room is imo the biggest challenge facing music listeners.

Guitarists who play in more than one tuning often have multiple guitars on stage, one (or more) for each tuning. They don’t play one guitar, retuning it for different songs. I find it hard to believe many here have any desire to re-"tune" their system for each recording they want to listen to. Am I mistaken? Don’t most of us want a system that makes ALL recordings sound as much like what we think music does (or perhaps should)?

Kind of a fun thread for me, cause while posts are going up I am also on my split screen walking people through tuning their components in real time.

mg

• statement (c. 1965), quoted in "An irreverent best-seller by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman gives nerds a good name", People Magazine (22 July 1985)

bdp24

"Components should simply reproduce the sound of instruments (and voices) contained in recordings, having or adding no sound of their own."

Wouldn’t that be nice! Or our ears, or our rooms, or our brains, or our locations, or our planet on it’s revolving. Or our orbit...and on and on it goes.

the variables buddy, don't leave out the variables

mg

Hi Terry9

you said

"Michael, you say that," ... when you dampen vibrations you’re also dampening part of the audio signal." In my system, parasitic resonances (all resonances are a form of vibration) such as those excited in the tonearm, are not part of the audio signal. So I damp them out. Don't think you can have thought this through."

As I've said above, I'm a do it guy. If your ears have given you a different result of course you have to be true to your ears.

mg

Hi millercarbon, thanks!

When I got into the HEA part of this industry I did so with some good advice from the guys who I worked with in the studios and on the road. I was known among some for coming in, doing my thing and quietly staying off to the side while the sessions went on not getting involved in the debates, credits, money or theory building. The advice was "never change that rule of mine". It's served my goals well and has given me valued friendships and a clear understanding of what it takes to become a long term standard.

We have a wonderful industry and hobby, all the way from instruments to the ear, and I have tried to be in every position of "Doing" I could have so I can be a forever student of this passion. The only way I knew to do this was jump in, do, and learn for myself without being influenced by talk minus the doing. There's a completeness about doing something for ourselves and if we do so in time the truth makes it's way to us. It's a process that may happen in a moment or one that may take a lifetime but truth itself is never false, and the learning of it is truly a matter of doing.

So for me, when people say that's not the case, can't be true, he's full of it, wow that made an amazing difference or whatever suits their proclamation, I know if they have really done for themselves they know. And as important, if they haven't done for themselves they may never know what has been waiting for them to yet be discovered.

Audio is not a world of assumptions, neither is audio recording and playback. Audio is a science that we will either do or not do.

Again thanks, it means a lot to me. Not that I was right or wrong, but that you saw I was a student of sound just like you with the same goal and passion! all my best

mg

Good questions and comments Terry. Damping the vibrations in a component, vibrations that the component may potentially add to the signal, is not "dampening (sic) part of the audio signal." Where in hell did THAT idea come from?! This idea that components themselves should be considered musical instruments, free to resonate, is SUCH an anti-high fidelity concept. Components should simply reproduce the sound of instruments (and voices) contained in recordings, having or adding no sound of their own. My God, that’s the first truth of hi-fi!

"Low mass frees the sound" and "High mass squeezes the sound" are just overly-simplistic bumper sticker slogans. Audio engineers don’t think in those terms. The high-mass VPI turntable platters (the purely stainless steel, the stainless steel/Delrin, and the aluminum/lead/Delrin) sound MUCH better than the low-mass acrylic platters. My Townshend Audio Elite Rock table has a plinth of a metal frame filled with bitumen pads and plaster-of-Paris, built that way so as to be non-resonant. Designer/engineer Frank Van Alstine suggests lining the inside surfaces of the wood bases of suspended subchassis designs (Linn Sondek, Acoustic Research, etc.) with modeling clay for the same reason. If high mass achieves low resonance, that’s a good thing. Of course, that too is an over-simplification, as there is the matter of resonant frequency, Q factor, etc.

geoffkait-
“If I could explain it to the average dude they wouldn’t have given me the Nobel prize.”