Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ.

---

[ Follow Ups ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Tweakers' Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Revisiting Magnetic Levitation, With a Twist

Posted by MTZ (D) on June 17, 2004 at 13:49:21

I picked up Stereophile this afternoon and saw a picture of the Relaxa magnetic levitation platform and raced home to look for more information. I've done all the searching and read the threads so it looks like the Relaxa is too good to be true. But how about this:

According to the Earnshaw principles you cannot make a magnetic levitation system without the thing being unstable and trying to fly away at the slightest jolt. Okay. But what if instead of one magnetic system you made 3-4 isolated "pods" each matched to another pod, all levitated by a magnet. Then load your equipment's feet onto the individual pods.

I'm thinking one of two things will happen: the good outcome would be that each pod acts individually; if pod A randomly wants to pull left it may be that pod B pull right or pod C pushes up, so that the random motions would cancel and stabilize the whole thing, much like random points of pressure out of and onto your body prevent you both from exploding and imploding under changing conditions. Or, the bad outcome: the unit you load onto the pods acts as a coupler, effectively making them all into one platform which suffers the same Earnshaw problems as the Relaxa and other devices.

Here are some other ideas on the matter: what if you built a table like the Relaxa table but used twice as many magnets. Using strong magnets to repel would ensure that the unit levitates but if you also used weaker magnets to attract could you theoretically counter the "wandering table" problem? For example if the table wants to wander to the right would the attracting magnets pull it back to center?

And a final idea is to remove the hard coupled spikes that join the Relaxa's bottom and top parts. These result in a hard coupling of metal-on-acrylic which transmits vibration (and noise, apparently, from the scraping). But what if you built a platform without the spikes and instead fought a wandering top shelf using something not coupled to the bottom plate, like a brick of cork on each side. It wouldn't be a pretty design by any means but 4" of cork would kill nearly all vibrations that could potentially be transfered to the top shelf and would also prevent your table from flying away.

Thoughts? It's an intriguing subject.

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Atma-Sphere Music Systems, Inc.

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2025, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---