Racquetball isolation platform perfection

Bombaywalla
If you hit yourself in the head with a hammer do you feel it? If I hit your turntable or stand holding your turntable do you think its gonna feel it and your gonna hear it thru the speakers? OF COURSE! However if I hit the wall across the room with the hammer now will your turntable feel it, will it amplify thru the speakers?

This was my point use the source of speakers to induce some kinda airborne or vibration in the room structure, not smacking it with your hand, this is a totally different induced action. I mean of course if you tap on your turntable with a pen you will hear the ticking thru your cartridge and amplify it with the speakers, but are your speakers that are not physcially touching even with heavy bass making the same "Knuckle Rapping" sound thru your system? No because unless you are literally bouncing your woofers into your turntable stand to physcially contact it like you are with your hand your really proving nothing right?

Okay, so here is what I want to know… knuckle rapping cannot be very well proven to tell you anything with a turntable isolation. However my suggestion is this, first anything physically "Knocking" on something attached to your cartridge will most likely feedback the sound thru your speakers..

However are your speakers playing in the room doing it self induced via airborne or not? In otherwords here is what the real freaks can do to test this, go and buy a 50 or 100 ft roll of 12 dollar 16 gauge speaker wire from Rat shack or wherever… Take your primary speakers out of the room leaving your whole system in place ready to "Rumble" turntable and all…

With these speakers now out of your room, put a cheap pair of speakers or a boom box in place of those speakers…This has to be on ANOTHER system or Boom box source.

Hook up your primary speakers back to your amps in that room still with your turntable as the source using the long speaker wires across the house.

Now Play the boom box totally on a separate system while your Vinyl rig is on and needle down just not playing an album so that your primary speakers you hooked up now on your main system across the house is not playing a signal… Remember your whole primary system is up and running just as if you were in the room with it playing music, however the music is coming from another system not the same one your evaluating the sound from your turntable on. Go and see in the other room if your primary speakers are actually picking up any noise from the cartridge…during this totally separate system playing.

Can you hear the music coming thru your primary speakers hooked to the turntable that is not playing anything in the other room? Can you hear any "Thuds" or "Knuckle" knocking type sounds? If no then this is just physical forced wives tales about the knuckle rap test… If you hear music however like if your cartridge is a microphone? Well this is probably the real feedback, and best thing is to put a like Isolation box around your turntable like I have using some basic acoustic wall foam in a nice little wall structure to just absorb the reflections. Not sure if you will ever get rid of sound like this just because your turntable base is inert to all vibrations or not, I am sure it will help, but feedback would still obviously go back into the cartridge unless your turntable is in another room from your speakers playing entirely. I am interested in the results if someone tries this!

Also results of before and after "Ginko Cloud" or Solid maple platform would be good, so lets say you do hear all this noise on your primary speakers that the turntable is picking up in the other room, does putting it on the cloud or maple stand eliminate or help it? Oh and still without a record on the player playing I am sure this could be a good test then turning on your motor as well to see what happens further.

Bombaywalla
Heres a pretty simple story… A friend of mine had a huge big screen, and his rack between the speakers.. Fairly large room, all wood floors, kid that would run around time to time etc… Now I said first the location of all his gear was just bad, not even center totally off center due to the big screen in the middle, and cables all over yada yada… You could hear anything picked up thru his table unless directly placed on the floor coupling it to obviously the ultimate surface in the entire room to dissipate the floor.. Sounded good right on the floor with some cushion footers! However this is not practical nor safe, so realistically a new idea had to come out of it..

First off we had pretty hi end gear, and cables going which it sounded good but not great. So my idea was he had a wall to the right of the whole thing he could move this stuff too, however with obstacles, first cable lengths, and second french doors going to another area in the house.

So long story short I did a quick cheap test.. We moved all the gear to this wall, now easily 12 to 15 foot from any speaker resonance or drivers firing, the room was plenty wide to not even have to overlap the gear over the soundstage or be in front of the path of the speaker at all on that side. Well so now stuff is moved, bought some super cheap Rat shack speaker cables, like 16 and 14 gauge for about 18 bucks 100 foot…

I knew I was not happy running 15 plus foot speaker cables vs. the 4 ft expensive cables we had already been using when the system was in the middle.. But anyway doubled up the rat shack wire to give a little better current carrying from the amp to the speakers. Bottom line, this configuration blew away anything possible having the turntable or system in general between the speakers!! Cheap cables or not made no difference at the incredble results especially now the turntable sound was exhibiting…

Nothing made this table have an issue now, techno, super heavy metal, clean and smooth as water. Its simple, either overbuild to a ridiculous degree of racks and isolation in the middle of your speakers, or take the table across the room or out of it all together!

Put the table and system on the sidewall if possible, the other plus to this is kiling off all that reflection and soundstage your losing with the gear between them. Also I suggest that leaving the amp in the middle of the speakers for short quality cables is good, and taking long interconnects to the preamp on the side of the room, you will have excellent results… Of course ultimately it is better to have XLR balanced connection from your preamp source to the amp or amps between the speakers, but in most cases if your not going to far like 12 or 13 feet it can work fine..

I do not suggest however running super long interconnects to your turntable from the phono amp, this could create some kind loss or very high capacitance. That’s why I suggest moving the entire heart of the system from between the speakers in the first place.

By the way if you note the best systems in general do not have any source gear between the speakers due to several reasons, one of them being thats the spot where the most energy is focused many times in a given room. See several links below for examples, its probably the most overlooked simple tweak of all time! Of course you need the space, thats why conventionally everybody just goes and sticks their gear in the center as its just the way they normally think about a system or see it. links below to the best and brightest. This is not a substitute for good isolation, but trust me it helps just as much as the room acoustics themselves sometimes.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1188907858

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1065030431

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1140365841

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1169058049

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1104944182

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1170194197

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1123210106

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1094159192

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1090183709

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1065609917

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1022712214

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1036349020

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?vaslt&1069279142