The Cartridgeman Isolater.

I'm about to send a 2" x 2" x 3/4" block of non resonant, Caribbean Moca wood to a moderator in another audio forum. He's going to cut 1/8" thick pieces and install them between headshell and cartridges. That's going to be real interesting. Four of those blocks improve the performance of an amplifier, a whole 11" x 19" slab is simply amazing under a transport, turntable or my Clear Image T4 isolation transformer/filter array. A 1/8" thick board coupled to a small mechanical device like a cartridge should provide stunning improvements in clarity and dynamics. Moisture absorption would be my only concern.

Another of these small Moca blocks is shipping to Europe. This particular audiophile makes his own wood cartridge bodies and will try Moca with a high performance, low output MC.

No Voodoo here, just plain ol' mother nature...

Maybe Albert and Doug could give this wood a try later on.

With psychic power and primal intensity,

"A 1/8" thick board coupled to a small mechanical device like a cartridge should provide stunning improvements in clarity and dynamics."

How?

Tangram (Andrew)

I have a record of every Isolator customer in North America and I cannot find your name. Could you explain further?

I'm not disputing your results, just curious about the purchase history.

It's easy to criticize a product you haven't tried. It's already occurred twice in this thread.

Thank you.

It doesn't make any (mechanical engineering) sense. And certainly ruins any relationship one is trying to establish between cartridge compliance and tonearm effective mass. Especially after all the effort in recent years that cartridge makers and tonearm designers have made to machine the bottoms of headshells and tops of cartridges perfectly flat!

If a headshell spacer is required, it should be metal, of the same material as the headshell. First, so there is no differential expansion between the two parts with changes in temperature. Otherwise the bolt tension could become reduced over time. Second, wood is a cellular material and not dimensionally stable as metal, which is a crystalline material and can be machined to precision tolerances.

Putting a hard plastic washer on top of the headshell (under the mounting bolt head, or under a metal washer if the bolt head is too small in diameter) is actually a good thing Martha, and won't compromise the tight joining of cartridge to headshell. Instead, it allows for applying maximum torque to both bolts equally, with much less danger of stripping threads -- especially since so many cartridges are pre-threaded now and some of them have plastic bodies too (yikes!)

When I attended that little technical school in Cambridge, my acoustics professor, Robert Newman, had a favorite saying, "Sound is Round, and Wood is Good." But I believe he was referring to halls and instruments, not tiny mechanical devices.
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Just because a person isn't a registered buyer of a product certainly does not mean they haven't tried the product. There are such things as friends, relatives, spouses and, a used market (where in addition to being the location of worthwhile items, is often an outlet for gadgets tried and dismissed). And, the fact that such a list is being kept and a person would be publicly exposed (or unexposed) using same list is yet another reason NOT to buy one, there, Audiofeil (Bill, Mustang, 101, whomever).