Subsonic Rumble Solutions


I know many of you have tried to address this issue. Short of buying or building a subsonic filter (that will/may negatively affect your transparency) - what methods reduce subsonics (meaning the pumping of woofers and subs when a record is playing)?

My system:
I have a DIY VPI Aries clone with a 1" thick Corian plinth, a Moerch DP6 tonearm and Dynavector 20X-H cartridge. This sits on a maple shelf. The shelf sits on squash balls. The balls sit on another maple board floating in a 3" deep sand box. All this on a rack spiked to a cement floor. The phono stage is a Hagerman Trumpet (no built in subsonic filter and very wide bandwidth). I use the 1 piece Delrin clamp on the TT. Yes, I clean records thoroughly and there are no obvious warps, especially after being clamped.

So my isolation is very good - no thumps or thwacks on the rack coming through the speakers. But if I turn the sub on I get that extra low end pumping on some records that hurts my ears. Mostly I leave the sub off when playing vinyl, but I would like to use it if possible.

There was some brief discussion of this on Albert Porter's system thread. I'm hoping to get more answers here.

So ... what methods have you tried to reduce subsonics that you have found effective?

Thanks,
Bob
ptmconsulting
My rumble went away when I decided to change out my cartridge, which on paper looked to be a great fit with on resonance issues. I went from a Dynavector XX-1 HO to a Transfiguration Temper LO. I didn;t change anything else, but I can now safely turn on my sub when I'm playing vinyl with no excessive pumping.

Go figure.

Bob
Bob-
I am wondering, did this help with all you LP's, or just some. I know in my system I only have rumble on certain LP's. Also you say "I can now safely turn on my sub when I'm playing vinyl with no excessive pumping." Do you still have pumping?

Thanks for your insight-
This solved the problem on all the LP's that I have played since I upgraded. There is still some little movement on my woofers, but not the "huffing" that I was getting before very audibly on my Rel subwoofer.

And believe me, I tried everything mechanical, short of an electronic filter, to identify the cause of this problem and remove it. It must have been a cartridge/tonearm mismatch.

Good luck
Maybe your dyna, while still functioning fine varied from the spec'd compliance enough to cause the issue(?) I think all phonostages should have a subsonic filter, talking with a friend who mfg. tube gear, he expressed same sentiment.
Thanks for your reply Bob. I know that a lot of vinyl has rumble recorded (unintentionaly) into it. I have 3 copies of Pat Benatars' Crimes of Passion and they all have the same rumble. I keep toying with different ideas for filtering it out.