Has anyone tried to remove the supplied rubber footers from a piece of electronics and very tightly bolting the bottom plate directly to a massive steel plate shelf in a steel rack system?
Peter, that is actually a superb idea and in my patent app I had a number of drawing for which I anticipated one day components would be designed a bit differently to fasten tightly to their supporting shelf.
But that's only the beginning of a good idea, not the end. Say you were able to successfully do just what you proposed. There are still numerous things left in question that could leave you scratching your head as to why just tightly fastening/coupling your component to its shelf only provided marginal gains. Other things to consider in addition to your suggestion might include:
1. The location of the power supplies and any motors within the chassis. For max gains a mechanical conduit needs to be placed directly below those objects and mating with its shelf. If indeed mechanical energy wants to travel, this is the best way to provide an expedited exit path so that the energy does not have travel much within the chassis before existing. Think of a faucet on full blast but pouring straight down into the drain without any buildup in the sink basin. But you don't want to forsake other parts of the chassis because it's best to assume every electrical part and wire within is vibrating to some extent when current is pass through it.
2. Some-to-many components, regardless of price, are not necessarily built like tanks. Especially the lighter ones. So let's say you tightly fastened/bolted your component to the shelf and say the component's top plate was the typical poorly anchored flimsy stamped sheet metal that becomes easily excited by resonant energy and maybe even so excited that the top plate even starts vibrating in sympathy with vibrations already captured. The tightly coupled chassis will not be enough to cure this potential release point of unwanted energy. In fact, with some components, and if say the rack isn't up to snuff, the tightly coupled component chassis just may now be the most easily excitable object.
I always used to associate damping with isolation. But about 7 years ago I realized that damping can be a very complimentary benfit to resonance energy transfer. For example. Given the above, something must be done to minimize the top plate's potential to vibrate, whether it be mass loading with free weight or clamping, etc. In essence, what you are doing at this point is recognizing this defficiency by saying, I know mechanical energy wants to release itself here but by shoring it up with tight or taut damping strategy, you're saying don't allow the energy to be released here but keep traveling. Hence, you're trying to convert the top plate into a sufficient enough mechanical conduit to make that happen.
3. The metal shelf isn't gonna be of much help unless it too is tightly coupled to the rest of the racking system and it too is sufficiently anchored into the sub-flooring system. Perhaps the best way to describe this is to think of creating the best performing table lamp in the world (whatever that means). To do so requires, among other things that the outlet be of superior quality, as is the wall plug, the wire, the socket, and even the lightbulb itself. And every one of those connections' fasterners must be as reasonably tight or taut as possible as this will ensure maximum illumination and max meantiime between failure rates for all electrical parts including the lightbulb itself. But one compromised connection along the way is all it takes for sporadic dimming, flickering, and premature wear, again including the lightbulb itself.
But that is an excellent suggestion and everybody has to start somewhere.
BTW, regarding Valin's comment about our even our best playback systems only capturing 15% of the "magic" of the live performance. That "magic" should not be translated as 15% of the sound as you mentioned earlier. There's plenty more sound than 15% but I just translate his use of the word magic to "believability". Not to digress but believability encompasses everything, but of those things that more readily capture most of our attention and what seems to be the most evidence IMO what is missing the most from the industry's best playback systems is the pristine and even delicate highs, warmth, dynamics, balance, distance, timbre, quality of bass, and especially the ambient information of the recording space or hall.
You'd be amazed how some significant bass notes of a music piece you may have played hundreds of times suddenly appear where you thought there was none which then leads to balance and warmth. Not the kind of warmth induced by tubes but by the recording itself which is wholly sufficient. If I had to pick a single character that most readily convinces me I'm hearing something nice, it has to be the ambient info of the recording hall. There seems to be volumes of it in the recording and I'm talking the vast majority of recordings, not few. And when you're hearing volumes of ambient information of the recording hall, that automatically should imply you're hearing volumes more of every last note. And the need for room acoustic treatments has just dropped to near zero. IMO. I know this is very controversial but if one is suddenly hearing so much more of the venue of the performance, should that not imply that you're hearing far less of your listening room and its anomalies?
There is another characteristic that requires a bit of detail to itself and that's the size of the instruments. In particular the size of higher frequency percussive instruments like a trangle. IMO, distortions induced by mechanical energy induce far more harm than all other distortions combined, including those resulting from noisy AC. When these distortions are not sufficiently addressed they will make the instrument's notes not only sound closer but larger than life. A typical triangle might be 8-inches per side. But when these distortions aren't absolutely minimized, they can sound like 18 or 24-inches per side. And there's nothing real about that. But when these distortions are absolutely minimized, their natural size comes into play and that is where all of a sudden delicate takes on a whole new meaning. IMO.
