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Looking for turntable isolation advice

Greetings from Oregon,

Was hoping to get some suggestions on turntable isolation for my particular situation.  My setup starts off with two strikes against it - suspended wood floors in my apartment and the turntable between in the speakers.  Neither is ideal, but that's the room I have.  As it's an apartment, structural changes are out of the question.  I have a VPI Prime on the stock feet, which are a nice step up from the feet on the Traveler that I had before, but I'm not sure about their ultimate performance.  

For my stand, I am using two heavy duty (about 70lbs. each) Sound Anchor speaker stands facing each other with a 4" maple platform on top of them (with blue tack between the stand and platform).  The stands are spiked into Herbie's gliders.  I find that all of my stands sound better on the gliders or generally decoupled from the floor.  The speaker stands are only about 10 inches wide but the platform is 24"x19", so it's probably not the most stable set up.  I'm getting good sound, but I know that the table is still subject to some vibrations.  I'd like to get advice on anything that I might do to better the performance of the table.  

I've considered some the following:

1). Aftermarket footers for the table, possibly Stillpoint Ultra SS.   

2). Better spikes on the stand - Gaia, Stillpoints, Track Audio, etc.

3).  Paving stone under the stand

4). All of the above

5). A wall shelf.  This would be a big task as the table weighs close to 60 pounds.  The only commercial turntable wall shelves I've seen hold 40-80 lbs. max weight, and I'd like something that is rated much higher to be safe.  I guess I could try a DIY project.  Would love to get the maple platform on brackets on the wall, but that would bring the weight over 100 lbs.  

So, any thoughts would be welcome.  It's turntable only rig, so I'm trying to wring every last ounce of performance out of it.  

Thanks so much for any insight that you might have.

Cheers,Scott
smrex13

Showing 1 response by glennewdick

glennewdick's avatar
glennewdick
702 posts
 

I also was in a similar situation as a few months ago. and I believe Willywonka has a good approach. I tried isolation pods, feet of various types and ended up with steel spikes and huge granite slab ( 165lbs) on top of my 3 legged rack. I found any soft isolation tended to deaden the sound quite a bit the hard points made everything much more focused.

Wall mount would also be very good if the walls are not too springy, corner loaded is the best that I've tried with a shelf in a corner supported from both walls but hard to do in most rooms but this gives the best mount for strength and isolation from movement, I supported about 200lbs of table and granite on a corner shelf so no worries about how much it can hold. I built my own corner shelf using 1.5" x 1" wood glued and screwed and braced.

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