Seismion - new active isolation platform from Germany

[TLi]

The reason for a rubber sheet between the equipment and isolator is to give the isolator more freedom to cancel vibrations from below.

i did the opposite. I use metal cube to hard couple my equipment with isolator. I find this arrangement gives better sound. Of course, every system is different so as personal taste, you have to try different combinations in your room in order to get the best sound.

 

[wil]

The reason for a rubber sheet between the equipment and isolator is to give the isolator more freedom to cancel vibrations from below.

i did the opposite. I use metal cube to hard couple my equipment with isolator. I find this arrangement gives better sound. Of course, every system is different so as personal taste, you have to try different combinations in your room in order to get the best sound.

Has anyone experimented with Revopods or Center Stage footers between components and the isolator or would they be working at cross purposes?

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Has anyone experimented with Revopods or Center Stage footers between components and the isolator or would they be working at cross purposes?

i use RevOpods on my Wadax Reference Dac and Power Supplies then sitting on a Daiza. the reason is the shape of the Wadax chassis. it uses 8 footers.....which also need to be tuned in terms of height and compliance. with 8, a normal footer can't work. it requires the adjustability of the RevOpod or something similar. i listened to it with just RevOpods, and it's better with the Daiza.

the Daiza does not settle or float like many passive isolators; so the action of the RevOpods seems to not be compromised by it. it's enhanced. in the same way the Daiza is used in the Taiko Tana system.

generally using two separate passive devices stacked is not a good plan......think of adding another suspension under a car suspension. chaos.

 

[wil]

i use RevOpods on my Wadax Reference Dac and Power Supplies then sitting on a Daiza. the reason is the shape of the Wadax chassis. it uses 8 footers.....which also need to be tuned in terms of height and compliance. with 8, a normal footer can't work. it requires the adjustability of the RevOpod or something similar. i listened to it with just RevOpods, and it's better with the Daiza.

the Daiza does not settle or float like many passive isolators; so the action of the RevOpods seems to not be compromised by it. it's enhanced. in the same way the Daiza is used in the Taiko Tana system.

generally using two separate passive devices stacked is not a good plan......think of adding another suspension under a car suspension. chaos.
View attachment 102519

That’s what I figured.
Is your rack compliant? And do you use the foam inserts on your Daiza feet? Thanks

 

[Mike Lavigne]

That’s what I figured.
Is your rack compliant? And do you use the foam inserts on your Daiza feet? Thanks

my rack is solid, the Adona GXT with granite/wood shelves on 6 inches of concrete. yes; the Daiza uses the copper round/panzerholtz footers with foam inserts in the cavities.

 

[Cellcbern]

My Seismion arrived & installed.
The Hiendy Club in Hong Kong is the authorized retailer.

View attachment 100376
View attachment 100377

The sonic improvement is exactly what TLi has said on #1?
Shall I buy more? Haha

Wondering how the Seismion stacks up against the Wellfloat Babel given the raves about the later at the AE forum. Have you heard both?

 

[Zeotrope]

Wondering how the Seismion stacks up against the Wellfloat Babel given the raves about the later at the AE forum. Have you heard both?

Well the Wellfloat Babel looks like a passive footer, not an active isolation platform. Completely different. Or am I missing something?
There are a ton of footers on the market — I don’t think any passive footer can compete with an active platform. They may be synergistic actually, as others have reported benefits from using footers with active platforms.

 

[Cellcbern]

Well the Wellfloat Babel looks like a passive footer, not an active isolation platform. Completely different. Or am I missing something?
There are a ton of footers on the market — I don’t think any passive footer can compete with an active platform. They may be synergistic actually, as others have reported benefits from using footers with active platforms.

I'm aware that the Babel is passive. I'm not interested in what anyone "thinks" in the absence of direct experience with the device. I was asking CKKeung who visits and listens at Audio Exotics if he could make a comparison based on having listened to both. Based on the feedback on the Babel at the AE Forum (it is claimed to "...annihilate mechanical vibrations at the molecular level....") that seems like a reasonable question to ask.

I am Speechless — Babel by WELLFLOAT

I am Speechless - BABEL by Wellfloat

audioexotics.vanillacommunity.com

 

[CKKeung]

Wondering how the Seismion stacks up against the Wellfloat Babel given the raves about the later at the AE forum. Have you heard both?

Yes, I listend to both of them, the Seismion many times & I own one, but the latter only briefly once.

I have been considering to get a Herzan or Accurion for several yrs, I didn't take the plunge because of their high prices.
I won't let go the more reasonably priced Seismion!


BTW you have to place the Babel at the Center of Gravity underneath the audio components directly for the max effect.
This may be unfeasible for some turntables and some components with uneven bottom or protruding screws.

The Seismion have 2 sizes and high applicability.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Yes, I listend to both of them, the Seismion many times & I own one, but the latter only briefly once.

I have been considering to get a Herzan or Accurion for several yrs, I didn't take the plunge because of their high prices.
I won't let go the more reasonably priced Seismion!


BTW you have to place the Babel at the Center of Gravity underneath the audio components directly for the max effect.
This may be unfeasible for some turntables and some components with uneven bottom or protruding screws.

The Seismion have 2 sizes and high applicability.

the other issue with active besides weight distribution is self noise. the active device cannot discriminate between outside resonance and self noise (internal resonance) from a turntable. if your turntable does give off resonance (most do) then that constant resonance will trigger constant compensation and burn out the active device over time; and, add noise (not reduce it) to your set-up.

i have three turntables and only one has zero self noise; my direct drive Wave Kinetics NVS. it's dead quiet. my CS Port and Saskia both give off noise. so if i want an isolation shelf for those 2, it would need to be passive.

 

[PeterA]

the other issue with active besides weight distribution is self noise. the active device cannot discriminate between outside resonance and self noise (internal resonance) from a turntable. if your turntable does give off resonance (most do) then that constant resonance will trigger constant compensation and burn out the active device over time; and, add noise (not reduce it) to your set-up.

i have three turntables and only one has zero self noise; my direct drive Wave Kinetics NVS. it's dead quiet. my CS Port and Saskia both give off noise. so if i want an isolation shelf for those 2, it would need to be passive.

Mike, can you detect the self noise of your two turntables with your fingers or are you only aware of it by the response of the active unit to it?

 

[Cellcbern]

Yes, I listend to both of them, the Seismion many times & I own one, but the latter only briefly once.

I have been considering to get a Herzan or Accurion for several yrs, I didn't take the plunge because of their high prices.
I won't let go the more reasonably priced Seismion!


BTW you have to place the Babel at the Center of Gravity underneath the audio components directly for the max effect.
This may be unfeasible for some turntables and some components with uneven bottom or protruding screws.

The Seismion have 2 sizes and high applicability.

Thanks for responding. Perhaps someone will compare the two at some point on components where both are a good fit. I see for example that the rave reviews for the Babel at AE were based on its use under the Robert Koda preamp.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Mike, can you detect the self noise of your two turntables with your fingers or are you only aware of it by the response of the active unit to it?

Peter, the only proper way to test your turntable for self noise is to place it on the active device (making sure the rack and floor are solid) and then observe the read-out on the LED screen to see if any noise is detected. i did this with my Saskia, it had noise. anecdotal observations and opinions about whether the feet of turntable transfer resonance won't help you to find out.

when "rockitman" got his AS-2000 we learned the hard way that the Herzan did not like self noise. it was a factor we had not considered back then. high mass platter string drive designs have 'some' self noise. like my CS Port LFT1, or the Micro Seiki you had. it's possible that the plinth and platter might be quiet but the motor box and pully certainly resonate on some level sensed by the piezo electric sensors. this resonance is not necessarily a performance issue in any way, it only is a matter of compatibility with using active isolation. not everyone wants to use active isolation.

cheaper active units such as the Seismion, unfortunately, do not have the added features such as readouts and leveling. maybe there is a diagnostic connection that allows for this measurement. or maybe you can test this on a unit that has the readout, then use the one without. what you are measuring is resonance through the footers that would be transferred to the top shelf of the active unit. the performance relies on the sensitive feedback.

obviously most electronics won't have moving parts, motors, belts and pully's. so this self noise concern is mostly limited to turntables and transports.

 

[CKKeung]

Peter, the only proper way to test your turntable for self noise is to place it on the active device (making sure the rack and floor are solid) and then observe the read-out on the LED screen to see if any noise is detected. i did this with my Saskia, it had noise. anecdotal observations and opinions about whether the feet of turntable transfer resonance won't help you to find out.

when "rockitman" got his AS-2000 we learned the hard way that the Herzan did not like self noise. it was a factor we had not considered back then. high mass platter string drive designs have 'some' self noise. like my CS Port LFT1, or the Micro Seiki you had. it's possible that the plinth and platter might be quiet but the motor box and pully certainly resonate on some level sensed by the piezo electric sensors. this resonance is not necessarily a performance issue in any way, it only is a matter of compatibility with using active isolation. not everyone wants to use active isolation.

cheaper active units such as the Seismion, unfortunately, do not have the added features such as readouts and leveling. maybe there is a diagnostic connection that allows for this measurement. or maybe you can test this on a unit that has the readout, then use the one without. what you are measuring is resonance through the footers that would be transferred to the top shelf of the active unit. the performance relies on the sensitive feedback.

obviously most electronics won't have moving parts, motors, belts and pully's. so this self noise concern is mostly limited to turntables and transports.

Hi TLi,
Would you please forward these info to Marcus of Seismion?
He can test turntables with his Seismion and tell us what he thinks.
Thanks a lot!

 

[Zeotrope]

cheaper active units such as the Seismion, unfortunately, do not have the added features such as readouts and leveling. maybe there is a diagnostic connection that allows for this measurement. or maybe you can test this on a unit that has the readout, then use the one without. what you are measuring is resonance through the footers that would be transferred to the top shelf of the active unit. the performance relies on the sensitive feedback.

I find it odd that an isolation table would burn itself out from self-generated vibrations and not a great design. Whether the vibration comes internally or externally should not matter. If it’s exposed to a constant externally generated vibration, say bass notes from a speaker, what’s the difference? It will still burn itself out at some point.

I wouldn’t assume that because the Seismion is less expensive it can’t deal with self noise. It’s true that it doesn’t have a display, but the way it dampens vibrations is not the same, and those who have compared it to the Accurion and Herzan said it performs better. I’ll find the quote from @Seismion where they talk a bit about how it works:

Based on our own measurements, our isolators offer a far better isolation performance than the Accurion i4, especially in the low-frequency range. Due to our dedicated noise-free electronics, we can also reach the toughtest vibration criteria curves required for todays industry and beyond.
Beside that, we can allow larger control forces to stabilize the vibrations generated by the turntable itself.

This is interesting:

We have made a test in our laboratory, and placed one of our isolators on top of the other. In a perfect world, the reduction in dB would be simply the sum of both, meaning 35 dB + 35 dB = 70 dB reduction. And really, we could show an overall reduction of 65-70 dB, which we have not seen in any other device out there!

I doubt that you can get the same results with competitor products, since
- the upper isolator is basically acting on a very soft foundation (which is the top of the lower isolator). So the above explained problems will occur if you are not controlling the force. If you control amplitude, then you just push away the lower isolator and not generate a lot forces
- the noise level of the isolator must be extremely low. Imagine that the upper isolator only receives about 2% of the floor vibrations, because of the first isolator. And still these tiny vibrations need to stand out of the noise floor.

The issue of self-noise may be attributed to the springs inside the Herzan and Accurion. If the high frequency noise is emanating from the component, it creates a pendulum or feedback loop that cannot be fully damped by the table… just an engineer’s guess. Perhaps @Seismion can elaborate further on this topic.

Yes your remark is correct, the active control forces are mainly used to improve the low-frequency range, while systems like Accurion and Herzan rely on steel coil springs for passive suspension (for Accurion I know for sure, Herzan I would also believe?). These steel springs of course are very weakly damped, and besides they have some higher natural frequencies (in fact, they have an infinite number of them). These low-damped natural frequencies then occur as spikes in the transmissibility curve, which of course is unwanted.

Our isolators feature a honeycomb-reinforced top-plate, which significantly adds damping beside stiffness. More importantly, our isolator does not use such steel coil springs, but rather some rubber-metal parts. While this makes low-frequency isolation a little harder (but we can overcome this by our sophisticated sensors and active control), it should have much less of the above mentioned problems with higher resonances.

 

[PeterA]

Some of these active isolation platforms were not designed to deal with an object that moves being placed on top of them. It’s just the wrong application. If it doesn’t work, it’s not the fault of the turntable.

 

[Mike Lavigne]

Some of these active isolation platforms were not designed to deal with an object that moves being placed on top of them. It’s just the wrong application. If it doesn’t work, it’s not the fault of the turntable.

agree that the active devices are merely tools, for particular purposes. when they fit the job, nothing is better.

and i think my mention of the active burning out with self noise is much less an issue, than the added noise from the constant loop of self noise. it will actually amplify the noise like a swinging rope. it's causing the rope to swing more. it's trying to correct something uncorrectable. which = more noise, not less noise.

ground noise or music resonance noise is constantly changing and dynamic. sure; if you played the same bass note incessantly it might eventually harm the active device, or maybe your floor is soft and your building is shifting all the time; that's not a proper place for active.

if you rarely play the turntable then even the self noise will not hurt to active device. but for instance i let my CS Port tt run for hours and hours since it sounds better the longer it plays. if it was on an active device that would harm the active device eventually. i guess i could only turn the active device on when i played music if i was getting a net benefit. so that would be the question.

 

[Seismion]

Hello guys,
we from Seismion (my co-founder Sebastian, and me) are checking this forum on a not-regular basis, and we have seen some speculations and questions recently arising, which I would like to comment on. You might call us a bit biased towards active isolation but we try to be as objective as possible. Also, since this is to some extend a very subjective matter, I really hope nobody feels offended, this is absolutely not my intention. I just want to share my personal understanding, and surely I also accept if you have other opinions.

First of all - when you write the isolator cannot distinguish between vibrations coming from the base (foot-fall sound etc.), and the ones coming from placed application (turntable), then this is absolutely correct, at least for our isolator. This is typically called active stabilization. It is the goal to remove any vibrations from the top-plate (isolated part), no matter where the disturbance comes from.

It is also correct that the active control forces are limited. And if they are saturated, then there is no more space left for counteracting the disturbance. But the question is, if we even come close to this saturation when operating a turntable on top. I will come back to this point a little later.

Mike, you mentioned at some point that 'cheaper' active units like ours don't have the sensor-readouts and levelling. It is true, we don't have this. But in fact, we believe this would not help anything concerning the operation with turntables. You would simple be able to see on the display, that the isolator is in saturation and perhaps not isolating anymore. But it does not give the user any possibility to avoid this situation. You even said that Herzan isolators, which are surely on the more expensive side and with display and levelling, have especially problems with that. Also levelling is no solution, because once a re-levelling is started, then isolation is totally destroyed. It is only used to correct large, quasi-static deflections.

This being said, I think our Seismion Reactio offers some advantages or at least differences compared to the competitor models. In the end there must be some reasons, why some users feel that the performance of our Reactio is superior:
- we are using stiffer elastic elements compared to Herzan or Accurion, I believe it might be a factor of 4 or something. All 'soft-mount' isolators (Herzan, Accurion, Seismion, ...) use elastic suspension elements for passive isolation of the top-plate. The softer these elements are, the easier it is for active isolation, since all base disturbances pass through these elements, and the force is proportional to the spring constant. Therefore -> a softer spring = less excitation to deal with. On the other side, for stabilizing against disturbances from the turntable, a higher stiffness is desired, because vibration amplitude is proportional to the inverse or the stiffness. The springs are the only support for the top-plate, and the stiffer they are, the better. For example: 4 times higher stiffness means only 1/4 of the vibration amplitude, which the active control has to deal with. That makes me believe our Reactio is in fact better suited for turntable operation than the others. By the way - this is also the reason why we do not need a levelling, because also the static deformation due to payload is proportional to the inverse of the stiffness.
- of course we also read out all sensor signals of the isolator during our development and testing phase. But we feel this does not give the user any real advantage other than being some kind of gimmick, increased cost and potential sources of errors.
- I would not call our isolator a 'cheap' product, but rather a cost-efficient design, which is tailored exactly to the needs of the user.
- there have been some user-reviews also about the operation with turntables, I believe. We have also tried it at home, and it worked well. We didn't check the sensor signals, but our feeling is that the disturbances are extremely small. We have no concern to leave the active control turned on for hours. Normally our isolator only consumes about 3 Watts. Burning out seems to be no real issue
- Our Reactio does not have any element that can wear out (like a friction contact of something else). We use self-developed contact-less voice coil actuators, so lifetime is no issue at all.
- Another statement here in the forum is also true, and might be important in this context: not all active platforms were designed to deal with large excitations. It is correct that it is not the fault of the turntable, but it is also not the fault of the isolator, if it was designed for another purpose originally. There is always a kind of trade-off between dealing with larger excitation, and with isolation of extremely small vibrations. You need a very high dynamic range to master both extremes, and then still a specialized unit would be better. I believe Herzan and Accurion models were not designed for audiophile users in first place but rather some industrial applications, so it is understandable that they might not be ideally suited for this.
- the comment concerning the active noise being amplified by the feedback itself like a swinging rope: here I beg to disagree. It is true, in control theory we know that a 'wrong' feedback loop will be unstable, and in such condition even the smallest initial disturbance is amplified with time. In fact, this occurs in a very short time, and growth only stops once the system is saturated in which the system remains vibrating. But the point is - in such an unstable case, it doesn't need a large initial disturbance like a turntable, but it would instantly be unstable once you turn the isolator on, even without any object placed on top. Therefore I would not share this concern.

I hope a few questions can be answered by this reply. Please feel free to ask further details. Also my colleague Sebastian would join in.

Best greetings,
Marcus

 

[ICUToo]

Thanks for that post, Seismion. Very interesting.
“Cheap” is clearly a relative term! I am in Australia- do you distribute here at all?
Is anyone game to post prices for these devices?
I have Antipodes Oladra, MSB Reference DAC and Audionet Humboldt on home-made supports on a wooden floor, so I am interested in a racking / isolating solution

 

[Cellcbern]

Thanks for that post, Seismion. Very interesting.
“Cheap” is clearly a relative term! I am in Australia- do you distribute here at all?
Is anyone game to post prices for these devices?
I have Antipodes Oladra, MSB Reference DAC and Audionet Humboldt on home-made supports on a wooden floor, so I am interested in a racking / isolating solution

FYI: https://www.wellfloat-global.com/