vibration control

Makes a body wonder how the electronics on aircraft, esp high performance military jets, and space craft, like the NASA stuff, work at all. Of course their functions might not be as crucial in space travel as they would be in high-end power amps.

Vibration control and vibration isolation is definitely a big issue for fighter jets and NASA spacecraft and much is done to ensure that vibration doesn't interfere with electronics, most of which provide critical functions.

Rok2id... Retired now, but I worked for 40 years on missile guidance systems.

The hardware is designed to work under extreme vibration. The shaker used to perform vibration testing shakes the whole factory building when in use. The effect of vibration is to induce mechanical faults. Bad solder joints let go, screws come loose, stuff like that. We never see a purely electronic failure, or digital data dropout.

Of course, the requirements on a nuclear armed missile aren't as severe as Rodman's audio amp. What the hell. So we hit the Chinese embassy. Big deal.

Eldartford: you are priceless.
I worked on missile G&C in the army. Air Defense, Field Artillery, and anti-tank. Worked like a champ in the middle east thingy.
But nothing as complex as a high-end power amp.

You know, there are measurements and measurements. If you are looking at a scope image of a waveform thru an amp in a vibrating box, and subtracting that from the un processed waveform, differences down to -100db or more will be easily seen. That's good enough for me.

What all the isolation folk forget is that not only is the component base vibrating but the AIR is transmitting such vibrations, which are typically uncontrolled. A room excited to 85db with 95db peaks or more will certainly be loud enough to couple to even well damped gear.

When we did vibration stuff with low frequency quartz crystals, we used a then couple year old Crown DC300 to drive the table.