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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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Tweakers' Asylum Tweaks for systems, rooms and Do It Yourself (DIY) help. FAQ. |
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In Reply to: The perfect gear stand? posted by Rick Barton on December 30, 2006 at 14:11:48:
I played around a lot on the DIY side in this area some years ago, but about 2 years ago I replaced my own designed rack with a Grand Prix Audio Monaco which did the job a lot better, but at significantly more cost. My first comment is that a lot depends on how far you want to go in this area. If you want to push the limits, then I think one of the better racks based on solid scientific and engineering theory is the way to go. If you're happy just getting a sizable improvement at a reasonable cost, there's a lot you can do yourself.I developed a number of "rules" when I was playing with things. These were derived from my experience at the time and I've come to have some reservations about the universality of some of them, but I think they still have some value as a general guide if you accept that one can find exceptions here and there.
1- I think rigidity is more important than mass, and I think that adding mass to an existing structure quickly hits a point of diminishing returns if it does not also add rigidity. Try to keep things as light as possible but you will find some components that do respond positively to added mass somewhere. My Dynaudio Contour 1.3 SEs seem to work better on heavy stands, for instance, and Dynaudio make their current stands fillable so the speakers are probably voiced on mass loaded stands rather than light and rigid stands. So, "as light as possible" means that you may have to add mass in some places, especially if the manufacturer has used mass in their test systems.
2- Rule 2 follows on from that reservation: try to find out how the manufacturer/designer sets the component up when they use it. The manufacturer's recommendations are a good place to start when dealing with a given component.
3- I think isolation is essential, and isolation tends to mean soft or springy layers. In my experience it's best to have only one such layer between a given component and the floor, and to have it as close to the component as possible. That means if you're going to isolate a component, place the isolation layer between the component and shelf, or between speaker and stand. Keep everything underneath the isolation layer rigid and coupled to the floor.
I did experiment at one point with placing cone cups on rubber feet between my speaker stands and the floor vs using the same rubber feet between speaker and stand and spiking the stand to the cone cups sitting directly on the floor. This was on a wooden floor. I thought things sounded better with the rubber feet between the speaker and the stand.
Playing around with racks/shelves is a bit harder because differences in construction tend to determine what you can and can't do. In general I'd spike the stand to the floor, couple the shelves to the stand, consider damping the shelves with something like Dynamat, and use some form of isolation between the shelf and the component. It is possible to do things other ways and to make it work—Grand Prix Audio do it differently with their racks, especially when you consider their Apex footers instead of spikes—but what I'm recommending is simple and it enables you to tailor what you do to the individual component.
There's a lot of options out there for isolation, and some of them like Vibrapods and a lot of the products from Herbie's Audio Lab are reasonably effective and quite economical. I chose those 2 because they represent 2 different approaches. Vibrapods are weight dependent and you need to match them to your component's mass in order to get the best results. Herbie's products operate effectively over a very wide mass range so you really don't have to worry about matching them to a component's mass in most cases. When choosing an isolation product, find out whether or not it is mass dependent and use it accordingly. Under or over loading a mass dependent product is a sure way to ensure that it won't work as well as it could, and may mean it simply doesn't work at all.
David Aiken
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- Re: The perfect gear stand? - David Aiken 22:21:59 12/31/06 (0)
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