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I've heard tale of people utilizing sand bags to imporve the sound quality from CD players. How much weight, and positioned anywhere specific? (over transport, evenly spaced, etc..) Also, using an inflatable inner tube with a board on it? What size tube? (inches?) Level of Inflation?
Check out :
http://members.xoom.com/Jon_Risch/cd-sand.htm
for detailed info on an internal sand bag tweak.If you are concerned about opening up your CD players chassis, then placement on top of the metal lid will help, placement of the CD player on top of four large bags that are about 2/3 to 3/4 full, with all air removed will help even more, and both together is best. Placement of top bags would avoid any louvers or ventilation slots, attempt to plave a large bag dierctly over the trnasport/middle of the lid, with auxillary bags as space allows. Several medium bags spread out over the top is better than one large one.
It is an axiom that you can almost never use too many sandbags!
Jon Risch
Jon, i am using one large bag that covers most of the top of my gear. The bags are about 11" square, lay flat and even have all of the air removed. They hold about 7 lbs of sand each. Would i be better off with several smaller bags spread out instead of damping the majority of the lid with the one larger bag ? Sean
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In my opinion, there is a tradeoff between too much plastic (dozens of little bags) vs. one large bag that might restrict how the sand can react. With several medium bags, the sand to plastic ratio is OK, and the bags are localized in terms of vibration reduction.
Try several medium bags, and report your finding here.Jon Risch
I'm sure that there are various answers here, but i have used innertubes with the gear mounted directly on top of it, no platform. Using a "levitating" shelf underneath the component just gives you another piece to resonate or pick up vibrations, in my opinion.The innertubes are inflated just enough to lift the gear off of the shelf and allow it to rock very slightly. This uncouples the floorborne vibrations from being transferred into the chassis of the gear. This tweak works so effectively that i can literally do full tilt jumping jacks or STOMP in front of my CD and it doesn't skip a beat.
To "mass load" or damp airborne vibrations / cabinet rattle, I then have large (1 gallon) freezer bags of sand on top of each piece of gear. I typically use about 7 lbs of sand in each bag and remove as much air as possible. I know that 7 is the "perfect number", but it was also convenient. Sand came in 35 lb. bags, so this let me treat 5 different components with each bag.
I used freezer bags because they are both larger and thicker. I didn't want sand leaking out and getting into anything. Kmart currently has them on sale for $1.90 for 40 of them. You can also pick up all the other necessary goods that you need there too. I would look for either 12" innertubes for shallow gear (passive preamps, etc) or 16" for deeper gear (cd, tuner, amp, etc). These cost about $2.99 apiece and a hand pump is about $5 - $7 or so. A bag of sand should be under $5 or so. For under $30, you can damp and isolate 5 pieces of gear. I would consider this a real "blue light" savings compared to "audiophile" pricing on commercial gear.
Be sure to NOT cover vents or heatsinks on gear that gets hot (amps). Melted plastic and sand all over would not make your listening experience any better........ Sean
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Daaeas,Adding to Sean's advice (like Sean, I use freezer bags on top and below my gear except for the CDP, which uses Sean's 16" inner tube suggestion), I also bought snack size Baggies which, while not as sturdy as the freezer bags, are rectangular so they work well for cables (they stack well so you can make sets of 3 high and run 2 rear surround sound cables between the 3 to keep the cables off the ground). So, every audio and video cable I own including ICs, video and power cords have sandbags on them. The thing is, I did all the speaker cables, then listened, then all my ICs, etc. and each time I felt I could hear a marked improvement. With the TV, I could see the improvement on the image.
I'm going to be real blunt here, when I first read Jon Risch's suggestion of this idea, I thought the whole thing was a bit... *weird,* and extreme. I couldn't deal with the concept of having sandbags sitting all over... what would people who came to my place think? After it dawned on me that every other tweak Jon recommended had resulted in terrific results, I decided to give the sandbags a try. After hearing (and seeing) the difference, I'm glad Jon was willing to share his experiences. There is NO WAY I'd ever take those bags off my gear now.
Robert
just one more thing I'd like to add. Packing tape is a necessity to seal the bags...even freezerbags. I've spilt a couple of bags in my day and it's not pretty. At least it happened on equip with vents on the bottom, so no sand got in, but it's still a big mess....
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