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Re: plinthing with ply

Posted by melomane (A) on June 15, 2005 at 07:40:54

In Reply to: Re: plinthing with ply posted by Fred J on June 15, 2005 at 02:28:44:

Hi again Fred, I hate to point this out, but until you glue and clamp those layers together you're still sitting on the fence and compromising the effectiveness of your plinth, and you'll reach old age without ever having actually heard what your plinth can do! Don't worry about hitting the "perfect" recipe for a plinth (besides, in CLD the differences are not that large, and I'll be damned if I'll sit around concocting different mixes and then going to a Helluva lot of trouble listening for differences: if the thing blows me away I am happy), it'll never happen, and since it will never hapen, then you'll never hear just how good whatever plinth you have is: as long as they are not securely glued together the contrained-layer-damping is moot, since they will vibrate against each other no matter how much you torque down the bolts, and will not be acting as one mass to make a CLD plinth. I demonstrated this to my own satisfaction when I compared a glued and clamped Direct Coupling plinth (in contact over a maximal surface with the metal top-plate) which was smooth and incredibly effective (ultra detailed, slamming, PRaT-ful, silent), with one in which shims were screwed into place to achieve the same thing, which resulted in various distortions and exaggerations. By wood-gluing and clamping the layers together they "speak with one voice", are a single mass in which the CLD becomes effective. Try it, damn the torpedoes, glue the thing, sand it, paint it, this part is the most fun! These days I am marbling my plinths to freeze in a moment of time the chaotic behaviour of fluids (I float alkyd paint in a tub of water and stir and dip the painted plinth in when a psychedelic pattern appears) to achieve a pseudo marbling which I then varnish, incredible fun. So better an "inferior" plinth glued together to act as a single non-vibrating non-resonant mass than a series of layers loosely held together (no matter the torque), better materials or not (they all have some penalty/signature/behaviour). Run the last few yards for a touchdown and have fun, and then move onto the next! And yes, building the plinth so it is married to the underside of the plinth pays large dividends in terms of focus, and especially utter spooky silence which even the high-end belt-drivers had never heard before from a turntable. We were many times convinced the phono input had been switched out when suddenly the music emerged from UTTER silence.

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