I'm not disputing that air transmits vibration, if it didn't we all put a ton of cash into a completely worthless hobby...
Yup. But according to you and even after providing an excellent example of what horrific affects air-borne vibrations will to a car, air-borne vibrations apparently have no affect on your sensitive instruments. Right, Dave?
I'm also not disputing that electric current causes mechanical vibration, this is very well known.
We could stop here. At least you admit there do exist some vibrations within your sensitive instruments and when you attempt to isolate, you’ve severed any hope of their ability to exit.
However, in a typical audio system, if the speakers are coupled to the floor it will result in the floor vibrating, which in turn transmits vibration to the rest of the house, including components, and causes various things to rattle and vibrate. These vibrations also use the coupling to travel back to the speakers and will adversely affect them as well. This approach is what I think is misguided, but it is promoted by people who claim vibration seeks ground as does electricity.
Uh-huh. So if a speaker is anchored to the floor all hell breaks loose in the house and even in the speaker because the floor acts like a mirror transmitting this unwanted energy back into the speaker from whence they came? But air-borne vibrations via the car analogy will do no such thing? You have an incredible imagination, Dave.
BTW, my 15-inch subwoofer is anchored via custom points it to the floor within 2ft of my components and rack. Do you suggest I move it further away? How about I suspend my subwoofer from the ceiling via bungee chords 2ft from my components and turn it so the driver is facing the components, like some of you do with your woofers?
Nevermind the analogy is horribly flawed, it may apply to lightning but not so much to powering an audio system.
Horribly flawed? You’re incredible. John Curl said he flicks his finger at a component chassis part and calls that his “ding” test. I responded by calling it his “ding-a-ling” test and suggested he stick within his area of expertise. I’m not sure yet what my suggestion to you is. But I’ll get back to you.
They think that the floor the audio system sits on is a "sink" or "ground" for vibration and everything should be rigidly coupled to the floor to transmit vibration to the floor and thus "drain" vibration from the speakers and components. I believe this does not work as intended whether the results are considered positive or not, for me the results are very bad sounding compared to using viscoelastic material to dissipate vibrational energy.
Oh, but draining does work and work superbly. There are inferior executions and superior executions. My guess is, the only executions you’ve tried most likely were not of a superior nature.
BTW, you probably were unaware, but attempting to efficiently transfer resonant energy, there most always is an incubation period while the disparate objects settle-in? I can give you some fairly exacting times but I doubt it will help.
For example. If somebody like yourself is just dabbling with a product adhering to the energy transfer method, the improvements won’t even start to kick for about 5 days. That’s if you don’t touch anything. If you move things around, the incubation period must start over from the beginning.
In your case, if there were any improvements with your feeble attempts, they’d probably end on the same day they started so you’ll get maybe 1 or 2 little gains, no big deal right? In my case, the improvements will usually start on the 5th day and will continue to improve almost daily for weeks, months, and even years. The longest it’s ever taken for one of my products to settle is 18 months. That was without touching a bloomin’ thing in the system for that entire period of time.
So even though I’m the one full of BS and misguided, you being unaware of the settling in time period, you probably removed the product before it even had a chance to demonstrate anything worthwhile. If that’s not the case, then you were probably moving things around so the allotted initial settling in process could never occur. Hence, if the coupling products were worth anything to begin with, your feeble experiments with such were probably for naught.
Even if per chance you had such an awareness, then there’s a whole ‘nuther small can of worms that need to be considered. All of which has to do with creating not just any ol’ mechanical conduit but a vastly superior mechanical conduit that allows mechanical energy to FREELY travel between normally disparate objects. Think extreme mechanical conduit including certain materials, designs, executions, stress, mass-loading, etc. and much patience. And without these considerations any such experiment is feeble, a token, or half-assed effort at best.
As far as vibration transmitted by air and electric current, the same devices that decouple the component from the floor or surface it sits on will go a long way to dissipating this vibrational energy as well, but many people go further by mass loading, applying damping to the chassis, etc. Additionally, wires, capacitors, inductors and trafos can all be mechanically damped as well, many people have found great benefit to doing this. I use damping materials in the cables I build as well, both for the wires and for the connectors.
Great benefit? Dave, you’re getting hyperbolic on me here.
Sure, you can play the damping game and when the desire is for energy to travel, there is a time and place for it to maximize potential gains. However, you do realize don’t you that damping does not squash energy or convert it to heat as you want to believe?
Damping is the reduction of amplitude of mechanical motion of an object. IOW, damping is really the attempt to subdue an easily excitable object like a chassis top plate or a vacuum tube to keep the vibrations from dissipating or releasing its energy there. If by damping, the vibrations are unable to release their energy there, they travel to the next easily excitable object and release its energy there.
Damping invokes energy travel. That is to say, don’t release your energy here but instead keep moving and try to release it over there. But when there is no exit point, it’s going to release the energy somewhere within. Thanks to your trapping it. So yes, in an “isolation” attempt, there is the likelihood of damping so many objects that perhaps the objects chosen to release their vibrational energy might induce less sonic harm than some of the more sensitive and significant internals.
A tuning fork is an excellent example of damping. Your grasping the stem with your hand and strike one of the tines to invoke the tuning fork to vibrate. The tines are oscillating like mad but since your hand makes for an excellent damper, there is little oscillation in the stem, thus, with nowhere else to go the energy travels back and forth between the tines and releasing its energy at both tines for an extended period of time. Since you only struck one of the tines to invoke vibrations but both tines are vibrating equally should substantiate the fact that when vibrations attach themselves to a physical object their desire is to travel. If it weren’t for your hand damping the stem that too would be oscillating much like the tines. But then according to you your hand should be exceedingly warm since it’s been damping the vibrations at the stem converting the vibrations there to heat, right?
I will say I don't have the cash for Stillpoints and the like, they are super-high markup luxury items and I cannot afford products like this. I did settle on Herbie's iso-ball footers, they are better than anything else I have tried, even moderately expensive stuff like BDR, Synergistic, and many more. I think Herbie's offers a good value and products that work very well. If you experiment you can find low-cost materials that may work well too, like rope caulk, but you can trust Herbie's products to sound good when used as intended.
Talk about misguided and BS? I engaged in a bit of meaningful dialogue with Herbie (Steve) about 8 months ago in another forum regarding his highly questionable claims and assertions. To be kind I’ll just say Steve was contradicting himself routinely and after 4 or 5 exchanges he stopped responding my questions because it wasn’t helping his cause in the least. I even offered him the last word, but as I recall didn’t take it. Then again, it’s quite common for many isolation product mfg’ers to apply inappropriate names and terms to their products whose designs contradict their claims and what they think their products do. Just as they routinely do here on WBF.
For speakers and subs I think IsoAcoustics products work very well if you have the vertical height to spare. In fact, with your subwoofer example where the sub is rattling everything, try placing a sub on spikes vs IsoAcoustics sub stands and you will find the Iso stand eliminates a great deal of sympathetic vibration. Of course it can't prevent airborne vibration but it does a great job preventing the sub's energy from driving the floor.
Again the floor-borne thing. You mean place the car with the subwoofer on points or spikes, don’t you Dave?