Does anyone use wood for vibration control?

I have fairly recently been in a room designed by Art Noxon of Acoustic Sciences Corporation, and build using his products. The walls are double layers of sheet rock with Wall Damp constrained-layer damping between them. I rapped on a wall with my knuckles, and the sound produced was like knocking on a brick---non-resonant. In other words, the walls produced no sound of their own (right, I know; don’t knock on your walls when music is playing ;-) . That’s "one" approach, another is to "tune" your walls until the room sounds "good" to you on any given piece of music. Sure, you may then have to "retune" the walls for another piece of music, but what price musical pleasure?

All the wall/wall and wall/ceiling intersections of the room are fitted with ASC Acoustic Soffits, to absorb room mode standing waves/resonances. Because of that, the room is very "neutral", not imposing its’ own sound on that of the source material and hi-fi system. That’s "one" approach, another is to let those standing waves roam free, in the name of not "killing" ANY vibrations, mechanical or acoustic (’cause, you know man, music is vibrations). You may then take measures to "corral" those acoustic vibrations, to produce from the recordings you are playing the sound YOU want. It’s all about you, man. J. Gordon Holt was right about the generation of audiophiles that followed his.

All one has to do to see evidence of the ability of a well-designed spring system to provide true isolation is to watch on You Tube the videos Max Townshend (a real mechanical engineer, if you care about such matters ;-) has made to promote his Seismic Pod products. He attaches a surface mount accelerometer to the outside wall of the enclosure of a floor-standing loudspeaker, and assaults the speaker enclosure with various forms of vibration, both loudspeaker generated and floor borne, both with and without the Seismic Pods installed.

Having seen the demonstration, the listener may then decide for him/herself whether or not he/she wants to prevent floor borne vibrations from reaching the speaker enclosure, and if he or she wants to evacuate driver-generated vibrations from the enclosure onto which they are mounted.

Live music is a whole-body experience, not just a sense-of-hearing one. Headphone (or ear speaker, as Stax puts it), ignores the physical aspect of music. Our ears hear music, but our skin, organs, and even bones feel it. Headphone listening is a completely different experience than is loudspeaker listening, a more purely cerebral one.

The only genius I have personally known (that’s not my opinion; He was a computer programmer at HP, and they wanted to know just how smart he was, so had him tested. He also had perfect pitch, loved J.S. Bach, Brian Wilson, and Bob Dylan, and was an excellent songwriter. As proof of his intelligence, he elected to not pursue a career as a professional songwriter or musician ;-) preferred listening to music on headphones rather than loudspeakers. But then, he didn’t need to "hear" the music, he could just read the sheet music to achieve the same result.

When he returned from an assignment in Germany (HP sent him over to train some programmers), he had a new supervisor. He told HP he couldn’t work for such a stupid person (she was undoubtedly very smart, but he had a very low opinion of women, except mine ;-), and resigned. He took his 401K money, paid a year’s rent on a house, and spent that year playing computer chess and recording Bach music which he performed on the piano he had shipped back from Germany. What a nut! We were about to embark on a recording project when in 2008 he died of a massive heart attack at the age of 56. I feel extremely fortunate to have known and made music with him.

Michael Fremer’s video made at AXPONA 2019 includes this exchange between he and an attendee at the Mag Lev Audio (makers of a magnetically-isolated turntable) booth: Attendee: "It (the table) avoids the vibrations. But ya know some people say records sound warmer because it gets the sound from the speakers to the stylus." Fremer: "No. Those people are idiots."

The size of the LP groove is extremely small, it’s modulations even smaller. The stylus measures the modulations in the groove, transducing those measurements into an electronic signal. The measurement is microscopic, the signal very low in voltage. Both are very susceptible to corruption from outside forces, mechanical and electronic. Any unrelated vibration affecting either can result in a change in the signal---either a loss of information, or an addition of artificial information; that’s called distortion. One may find the distorted sound "pleasing", or "musical", but it’s short of the highest level of music reproduction quality.

And what’s with this obsession with soundstaging?! Recordings made in studios (the majority in most peoples music libraries) contain phony, artificial, fabricated, illusionary imaging. I’m much more concerned with 1- the sound of the instruments and voices themselves---their timbre, tonality, color, texture, weight, body, and 3-dimensional palpability; and 2- the effect of the playback system on the timing of the players and singers, and the subtle interplay between them all---the inherent, essential temporal nature of music. Both of those effect the emotional content of the music and lyrics, and even it’s quality as music. Soundstaging is a parlor trick, devoid of musical meaning.

Ay carumba! Does it really need to be stated that a, say, CD player (or amplifier) does NOT make sound by "vibrating"? Sure, like a turntable, it has a mechanical component (the CD spinner), followed by lots of electronics. If those electronic circuits were to be prevented from vibrating, would you then "hear nothing at all" coming out of the CD player? Who would believe such an obviously preposterous notion?

The fact that my Townshend Rock turntable (and the arm mounted on it) "vibrates" less than most other tables allows me to better hear what is on the LP. (Max Townshend likens the mechanical damping the Rock provides, to the tripod you mount a camera to in order to prevent blurring). If the table "vibrated" more, that vibration would be added to or subtracted from that which the phono cartridge is sensing in the LP groove. You don’t have to be a genius to know that is obviously an anti-high fidelity notion.

The terms I see being used as marketing are the simplistic bumper sticker slogans of "low mass", "new paradigm" (reminds me of Tony Cordesman’s old reviews in TAS and Stereophile. He proclaimed every new amplifier he reviewed---the Adcom 555 comes to mind---to be a complete game changer, upsetting the amplifier world order prior to the introduction of the new paradigm-changing amp), and "HEA" used pejoratively. Hey, if you don’t have any real ideas, you have to come up with some bogus ones, right? Something no one else is offering (for a good reason ;-). Gotta have something to sell. Reminds me of entertainers who can't sing very well, and can't write a song to save their life, so they instead put a lot of dancing into their live show. You don't sell the steak, you sell the sizzle!