2. misc-audio
  3. 157029-140647

Just confused

Hi I am fairly new to using high quality audio equipment.  I have assembled all of the gear I want for listening/enjoying the music.  Of course it’s only a matter of time before you ask yourself “What if?”.  I understand that room acoustics matter so I am off trying to implement acoustic panels - some good relatively consistent advice here.  What I struggle with is the subject of vibration control/isolation ... the advice from the community is not very consistent.  The floor in my listening room is slab cement with ceramic tiles on top.  I have Avant-garde Uno speakers (with spikes since that is they way they came), REL subs (rubber feet) and effectively an unbranded equipment rack (with spikes).  Are spikes what I should remain with for this kind of surface?  Does it make more sense to decouple the speakers and rack from the floor with some kind of isolation device?  Should I be replacing the current metal spikes with “cones” (or other device).  Should I use the same device for speaker and rack?  I just want to avoid shelling out a bundle of money for something that may turn out being a negative.  Thanks in advance for your patience with my naive questions.
chilli42

Showing 1 response by cakyol

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cakyol
940 posts
 

Try and plug EVERY equipment that you have into the SAME power outlet. This will minimize ground loops (which cause humming, buzzing sounds) which will sometimes be EXTREMELY annoying & difficult to get rid of. Keep the power cables as short as possible to help this.  The idea is that ALL the earth connections on ALL your devices be at EXACTLY the same potential.  Even a skew of half a  milivolt will cause humming and buzzing sounds.

Ground loops are not usually a big problem unless you have turntables & associated phono preamplifiers (or any device with very low input signal levels), but it is always good practice.

If the total current requirement of all your devices exceed the capacity of your outlet (which is extremely unlikely unless you have 1000+ watt amplifiers), you can upgrade it to a 20 amp circuit later.

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