Vinyl Asylum

Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

Plinthing without ply

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