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Plinthing without ply

Posted by John Gratsias (A) on June 15, 2005 at 19:04:49

In Reply to: plinthing with ply posted by J.D. on June 14, 2005 at 21:36:13:

Although people on this forum and in the hi-fi industry in general would like you to believe that the jury is still out on how to obtain the best performance from a turntable, the research in the industrial fields concerned with vibration control was done years ago, the industry has settled on accepted designs, and their experiments explore domains 100,000 times smaller than the smallest feature on a record surface.

For specific pointers, take a look at what the industry uses for Atomic Force Microscopes: the plinths are either honeycomb steel breadboards (although they can be individually tuned for particular frequencies) or granite slabs, with tapped holes so your device can be securely attached to it in order to eliminate the generation of secondary vibrations (compare this with all the specialty support boards in hi-fi where they rely on secondary vibrations to achieve their unique "sound"). FWIW, turntables operate on the same physical principle as AFMs -- turntables are just a very-low-resolution, high-data-rate AFM.

It's always more comforting to believe that the experts in these fields don't know more than you do, and by just tinkering around in your garage you'll kickstart the next revolution in physics. Comforting, but not true. Then again, implementing the industrial experience to hi-fi would only produce a great performing turntable, not one that necessarily "sounds good", and thus the number of manufacturers would dwindle to single digits... not something that the hi-fi industry is looking forward to, hence the current sorry state of affairs.

John

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