Dekay, I tried using a very thin steel wire, coated in nylon, with a breaking strain of 90 lbs. I did this roughly first - as per my nylon experiment, and then used it to suspend a shelf properly. The results were fine except for the Transport, which needed a soft footer between it and the shelf or it sounded hideous - and I mean unlistenable. Finally I have found a use for the Vibrapods! I will have to experiment further, but I can tell you there really was a very significant difference between the nylon and the nylon coated steel. There is certainly an advantage in that the steel wire did not stretch at all, so I will try and make it work if I can. Garfield - I have found in the past that a welded steel rack is very important, and so employ one in both my systems. I find thick guage steel like 3mm is better than the flimsy store-bought racks. I also find that if you have a concrete floor (as in my beach house) then filling the stand with sand and lead shot (or something else) is a good thing, but if you have a floppy floor (as I have at home) then leaving the stand empty is preferable. So I have followed both of these in the present. It is in the area of shelves and footers that I don't feel I am getting it right. The best shelf I have come across is a low density board with a very hard veneer. It is very light and rigid and is fast and detailed, but sounds a bit crisp and crunchy - and it is not unlike how I remember the Torlyte shelf I owned many years ago. If using this board, I prefer using cones rather than soft footers, else the sound gets muddy. The other strategy I use is to put bladder products on the same board. This gets rid of the crisp and crunchy sound, but has a suck-out that tends to fall in the bass region somewhere, depending on the mass of the component and the bladder product used. Either way the suck-out tends to take away some of the propulsion that bass instruments provide to non-classical music, and therefore the rhythm suffers. There is also a slight impact on pace - probably due to the mass of the bladder products. Currently I use combinations of the board I refer to, Townshend Seismic Sinks and cones from Walker and BDR. I own soft footers but do not use any of them. Vantage audio, I have tried all kinds of ideas with MDF, including using a thick and hard lacquer, without success. One possibility is that our locally made MDF is just not the same as you use in the US. I once had a pommie rack and its MDF shelves were harder and denser than what is made in NZ. The Corian has finally arrived and I slipped a piece under each of my monoblocks - and I kind of liked it. It will take me a little longer to figure out what it does with the line level components given the gantry it is now all suspended from, but will report back soon. I have a feeling it will work better at the beach house sitting on a damped heavy rack, because this Corian stuff is very heavy indeed and has a ping a bit like marble and is more 'live' than perspex. Garfield - maybe it is the floppy floor at home that has caused me to suffer extreme structure borne vibration, and hence an obsession to deal with it.
Shelf Material
I have tried so many different shelf materials, and some are better than others, but I feel like I am just spraying bullets that always miss the bulls-eye. So far, I cannot live with the brightness of glass, the ringing of marble or granite, the sluggishness of acrylic, the muddiness of mdf etc. Light and rigid seems better than heavy and dense - in that I can live with the downsides more easily. I use heavily constructed welded steel racks - spiked to the floor and upward spikes supporting the shelves - and I reckon this is right. I like the way bladder products get rid of the resonances that plague shelves, but find that the way they slow down the pace of the music is hard to accept. Does anyone have some answers on this?
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- 88 posts total
- 88 posts total