A few years ago I thought I'd build a Turntable that is still about a year from being finished. The thought was mass is where it's at. If it's heavy it will take more energy to get it excited and vibrate.
After I picked up a few thousands dollars in parts my machinist asked me what I was trying to accomplish. My response was," The heavier it was the less it would vibrate."
He said, " Take it out of the vibrational environment and save money." I can do that soon and wonder if anyone else had the same thought and realized a cost effective improvement instead of spending more money on a better TT.
Cables over priced!?! No, really? :-) :-) Those same high priced SE cables you refer to all seem to have an even pricier balanced option. It is not the topology that people are willing to pay for. People who spend big bucks on cables do so for the way they perceive the cable to sound. Not because it is SE or XLR.
Any reasonably made SE cable will do just fine to about 25', but even then it is more dependent on the capacitance of the cable and the loads at either end of the cable. So, yes I would agree that doing long runs with SE may be trickier. I'm not an expert and I have forgotten most of what I learned on transmission line theory in school. But I have retained enough to know that while balanced design does have the benefit of noise rejection, this does not automatically translate into better micro/macro dynamics, resolution, inner detail. Whatever we chose to call it.
I have tried balanced components before, but I have gotten the best performance in my system with SE components. Does that make me think there is something inherently wrong with balanced topology? Absolutely not. As with any system it is the sum of the parts that determine the end results.
I don't believe in single ended terminations, in or out unless they're is no other choice. SE cables are fine if they're short!
SE cables are inherently more prone to noise and interference. Balanced cables shield both leads and the Mogami design incorporates three shields.
SE cables are OVERPRICED!
Balanced cables give you a 6db boost in level over SE cables, a plus.
Hardees Chicken biscuits are great if you have them butter both sides of the biscuit. JUST CHECKING TO SEE IF YOU'RE PAYING ATTENTION!!
The studios that record the music we listen to didn't use cables that cost $1,000 per meter. The GREAT recordings we revere from the golden years of audio were recorded on the same high end cable that my Altec M11 mikes used $.20 per ft in 1956.
Eight years ago I bought 1,400 feet of the best Belden Quad star Mogami cable they made at $1,60 per ft. It was the cable that was most used in studios and sound stages world wide and not because it was cheap; it was the most expensive cable Belden made except for that which was re wrapped with with special color covers for secondary sellers, AKA the cable barons.
Enough said about my personal preferences as I've probably made a few enemies that sell the, IMHO, high priced SE cables, but maybe it just my 68 years old ears!
I'll make a pair of Belden Quad Star Mongani pair with Neutrik cables and do a comparison when I get back home. My Lamm ML 2.1 amps are SE but do have non recommended balance inputs. Still, I'm willing to give it a try.
Granted, and I''m taking your advice in the spirit it was given. The Bose Music System does solve those damn cables I was complaining about. Wouldn't I have to stack around 80 of those puppies in two arrays of 40 each to match anything close to sound we'd like.
Congrats on your magnificent system. So much to admire, especially personally designed/built speakers and turntable. Awesome.
Too many cables will always be a problem until you just realize that a Bose wave system will solve all your problems!!!!.
Moving gear to another room is a problem unless your system uses balanced interconnects or you have a big bank account. I realize that not many manufacturers offer gear with balanced ins and outs, and the gear that does is usually more pricey; that limits it's availability to many.
Here on Audiogon, and other forums, there are those that justify the cost and sonic benefits of mega buck single ended audio cables. To each his own.
FWIW, 95% my gear is connected with Belden- Quad Star - Mogami cable and Neutrik connectors. The few single ended cables I do use are quality cables, shorter than a few feet, and carry signals that sound fine to my ears.
When I decided to build a Frankentable, still not assembled, it was going to be in my music room which is also inhabited by my subs. Minus K solved my problem and built a platform that would support the 750 lb table; that was 2 years ago.
Since that time The Tape Project and more vinyl turned my room into a used record store. An addition to my music room will hold all the goodies I now have boxed up and stored in my wood shop. I cut two doorways through the 12 inch solid concrete wall that separates the two rooms. The door closest to my listening chair is 16 feet away from where the tt will be in the next room. The floors in both rooms are 8 inch thick concrete and I'm looking forward to getting it all put together.
Now that my table will be in a separate room, I think I could've cut down a bit on the weight and put it on a diet.
Further to the points made by Mafuta and Dougdeacon :
My approach makes no sense if there are continuous or contiguous rigid surfaces or substrates on the ground between sources such as nearby vehicles or industry and the receiver point, where our audio equipment stands are. In my case the concrete base sits on the soil that lies under the listening room.
Unless you are listening in a house next to a freeway or heavy industry, I would say that vibrations affecting your audio gear generated from your speakers will greatly exceed those vibrations that are ground borne.
To be as comprehensive as possible, dedicated suspension systems for individual components and/or suspension of the whole isolated equipment stand base - as is often used for electron microscopes, could be tried.
I went the other room route because it was just to much equipment and "fragging" cables in our living- dinning room area. I couldn't stand anymore. Moving the entire audio front-end into family room turned out wonderful. Four dedicated ac lines, acoustically sound cabinets, front and back doors for excellent access, got use same isolation tweeks and it ended up sounding better. Another plus, was that this was done when we made a major remodel to our kitchen - family room area. So the addition acoustical bracing and extra materials into the custom cabinets throughout fabrication and installation were minimal dollar outlays.
Two negatives that are always brought up, "getting up and walking" at end of record and "cable length." Well, the getting up you must done anyway. Walking 10' or 12' more is no problem - its healthy! This works for me because I listen to music on lp's all the way through a side 95% of the time. If I were making constant music passage comparisons it would be inconvenient. Cable length not an audio problem anymore problem except for the costs and believe me it can be expensive - Stealth Indra at 4.5 meters. But, it was all worth it!
Choices end end up as experiences - learn and pick what works for you.
You can also use a ball bearing platform like the one Berry Diament recommends. He is a recording engineer who believes that very low level vibrations have a large effect on sound quality. I have used them and they do work. He has an interesting web site.
Good points by Swampwalker and Dan_Ed. Would a different room be better? Yes, since acoustic feedback is certainly an issue.
However it's far from the only issue and your mechanic was half wrong, or only half right. You should move your TT to an isolated room like Ianlane's AND use your isolation goodies.
A major source of vibrational energies affecting a vinyl rig comes from the stylus-vinyl interface. The earth's noise and other vibrations entering throught the floor and TT supports are also a factor, especially in very sensitive systems like yours. These will be a factor no matter what room the TT is in, even if it's in Dan_Ed's neighbors' house!
I have been fiddling with a huge broadcasting idler wheel turntable all weekend. While adjusting it in the garage with headphones plugged into its integral electronics I was most perplexed by an intermittent drone with the arm at rest . Then I realised the Grace professional arm and Stanton cart was acting like a microphone faithfully reproducing every vehicle that passed in the street 50 yards away.
Now it may not be a Rockport but there are degrees of everything.
I have been reading posts here for years, not having much that is new and useful to say. Maybe some will find the following approach useful:
When renovating our home we added a combined work/listening room with a suspended floor with an opening near one wall. This allowed a one ton concrete base (for my equipment stand) to be poured on the ground and be separate from all structures in the room. Cabinets were then built along that wall thereby enclosing my front end gear. The equipment stand space is lined with foam absorption.
This way I get effective isolation from structure borne vibration (at least from within the room) and some transmission loss from airborne vibration. I guess the cabinetry would offer reasonable WAF also. Fortunately I do not live near heavy industry or main roads or freeways.
I could make improvements with extra mass lining the MDF walls and doors of the equipment space. My equipment stand is nothing special - welded steel with sand filling where possible. No doubt this could be improved also.
I use tube power amps for my main speakers and found benefits in reducing microphonics by placing these power amps in with the front end as well. Fortunately they do not give off too much heat.
Everyone arrives at their own compromise as to how much trouble they are willing to go to in vinyl playback; for me if it is too inconvenient I will not use it as much.
"i don't think tonearms are affected by air borne reasonace". Really. Read that vibrations too. Think about it, the interplay of the low mass tonearm and the room 'excitment' will make any plinth mass and its stand the least of your problems. Just hold you finger on the arm and you will feel the resonance and vibration. Since the cartridge is coupled to the arm, that is affected also. The Rockport at the Sony mastering facility in New York City, which Sony uses for extracting record source material for which the masters do not exist anymore, has no speakers in the room. All is done with headphones. Sony found that putting speakers in the room had a significant negative impact on the extraction process.
i've had my Rockport recorded with the speakers at high volume and then while monitoring with headphones. at least with redbook level recording there was no audible difference. but that's the Rockport with SOTA isolation designed into the tt.
my other 2 tt's are sitting along the sidewall next to one speaker. my Grand Prix Audio Monaco stands and Formula shelves use passive decoupling to isolate floor borne vibrations from gear. it works pretty good. every 9 months to 1 year i renew the sorbothane discs under the shelves, and i can hear the improvement.
i do have a 6" concrete floor, and my speakers are sitting on decoupling footers. so floor borne reasonance is dealt with at the source quite well.
as far as air borne resonance affecting a tt; it likely depends on the tt, and the amount of mass in it's plinth. both my other tt's have high mass plinths (75 and 110 pounds) and i doubt are affected by mid and and high frequency air borne reasonance. i don't think tonearms are affected by air borne reasonaces. i would grant that any sound will have some affect. the question would be; is the affect audible? could you record it with and without your speakers playing and hear a difference? i doubt it.
my opinion would be that the complication of having a tt in another room, both in cable lengths and usability, would far outweigh negatively any potential benefits assuming a reasonable level of isolation in your rack, and solid floor, and a high mass plinth.
and then there is the main issue; you will listen to less vinyl if it's a pain in the ass.
Ah, Mafuta! A man after my own heart. There is NO getting way from my two bass horns. They easily energize the entire house. I'd have to move my table about 100 yards to the neighbors, but I don't trust them with my gear or my records. :-)
With due respect to Ken's machinist, there is much more to this than simply moving the table elsewhere. As others have mentioned there are the loses due to extended length cables, inconvenience, matching the load on the far end of the long cable to ensure the optimum transfer, etc. There are issues to address with this approach if you don't want to lose resolution. I have been trying to move to a setup more like what Elizabeth describes. However, for me that move would be to simply move the table closer to where my butt hits the chair after the stylus drops. It would be real nice to not have to walk back and forth across the room. I have worked through all issues on paper but what really holds me back is finding a 20-30' IC that will maintain the sonic presentation I enjoy now while not requiring a second mortgage to buy it.
I hear no feedback in my mass-loaded Gavia which sits right in between my horns. It may well be possible to get most, if not all, of the benefits of moving the table to another room by employing a sandbox under the table. It works very well for we Galibier owners.
All of my equipment except my amps are in a closet that opens to the listening room front right corner. The closet is on the other side of one of the houses main carrying walls. This does 2 things, I can play basketball in the listening room with no effect on my turntable or other equipment and I have no feedback issues regardless of bass levels in the room.
Yes, you are on to something as the acoustic vibrations created by the speakers will excite all the objects in the listening space. I isolated all my equipment in a adjoining space when I built a custom media room. The results were a significant improvement in the performance of all my components. Nothing is immune to air-borne vibrations of the speakers acoustic energy. I've been working with a friend in making an 'acoustic screen' to be used around an equipment rack. Hopefully it will come to market early next year.
I use an all horn system with 2 massive basshorns.The space between these two horns forms a funny shaped little room where my eqp is kept.Because this room is formed by the basshorns it is more of a bunker,The floor is a meter thick solid concrete as is the roof and the 2 curved walls are 18 inch brick and mortar. The door is made of constrained layers of wood and mdf and weighs more than 200lbs.
And the point of this boring bit of info? Well all eqp in there still benefit from isolation feet ,special stands and other usual measures and my Thorens Reference table still outperforms my Michell Orbe to the same degree it did out in the open.Of course the eqp does sound better thn it does when placed in the listening room.
Strangely not seeing the eqp and staring at it all the time has done wonders for Audiophilia Nervosa. The stuff is full of fingermarks,the phono stage LED died 4 years ago and I couldn't care less
Your problems have been solved! Move your turntable into the other room...after the record ends,you ring a bell and a trained chimp elevates the tonearm lift and simultaneously a peanut is released down a chute as a reward.Downside..chimps can be messy.You can always buy some track shoes.Please just sit down and enjoy your records in the same room like the rest of us slobs,Elizabeth accepted,of course.
Cable length can be overcome by using shielded cables and putting the phono preamp (high-drive unit) in the same room with the turntable then running the long interconnects to the in-room amplification.
My real concern would be having to jump up at the end of the record and go into the next room to lift the arm off the record... unless you use an auto-lift of some sort.
I haven't done it myself because I've always used decent turntables that were pretty immune to air-borne and other types of feedback. Plus, as I said, I wouldn't like having to leave the room to change the record.
Not an expert by any means here, but my first concern is cable length, emi/rfi exposure with longer cables and signal degradation. I would say stay on the track you are on and add a stand that contributes to dampening. Again just a novice speaking out.
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