The Tube Anti-Vibration/isolation Discussion

Discussion in 'Modifications and Tweaks' started by AllanMarcus, Sep 25, 2016.

  1. richard51

    richard51 Mr. Sorbothane

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    «Finally got some pads from Supplyhouse to reduce the tinging I was getting with my Valhalla 2 every time I bumped my desk. They work! I can knock the desk or even my Bifrost and get no tinging. Only a direct hit on the Valhalla 2 will cause a much reduced tinging. I don't notice any differences in sound quality. Yay for cheap solutions to actual problems.»




    You cannot have an improvement with this king of product, except if you put it under a washer machine....the load of this Shiit product is too light, and i doubt that with even 40 pounds on top of them that you will have an audible improvement....
     
  2. fraggler

    fraggler A Happy & Busy Life

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    I got exactly the improvement I wanted. It is clearly audible, too. No neuroses needed.
     
  3. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    @fraggler
    I think the effects of soborthane should be minuscule on headphones setups since headphones do not create significant external vibrations. Speakers setup should be more noticeable.

    Also I hypothesis that soborthane application on the various equipment will have a cumulative effect. Meaning if you isolate everything in your audio chain, the net improvements will be more remarkable.

    Like I said before, there are plenty of other gremlins in audio that needs to be killed first before you can notice this vibration gremlin. Don't go thinking this is a sure-fire improvement as it is not. Tweaking is not for everyone. Badly done tweaks can waste money or affect the sound quality in a bad way or worse, create a fire hazard.
     
  4. fraggler

    fraggler A Happy & Busy Life

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    Sorry, pretty much done with audio nervosa. Thanks, though.
     
  5. purr1n

    purr1n Desire for betterer is endless.

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    The reason I ask this because the two methods of mass loading and energy absorption / dissipation are different. I've found that different kinds of gear respond to each differently and that no one method or combination of methods works best for everything. There are pieces of gear where I prefer only mass loading and feel that the use of energy absorption / dissipation are detrimental. I was wondering if you had encountered the same thing, but it seems that in your case, you just plastered everything with sorbo.
     
  6. richard51

    richard51 Mr. Sorbothane

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    I understand your point and you have more experience than me in audio....BUT i have observe and experience first hand an improvement very audible with each and every piece of gear where i apply sorbothane , duro 70 with the right compression, this experiment is simple to conduct, not costly, reversible, the only proviso i make is this : sorbothane duro 70 is the better for optimal audio results, and where it is possible it must be optimally compress.... arguing with theory, opinions, is perhaps sometimes interesting, but nothing replace first-hand experiment...Try it...sorbothane duro 70+compression with a surplus load of around 20 or 40 pounds dependent of the weight of the gear... try it with a transformer, a power conditioner, or an amp. or a dac, or a battery charger etc... If you notice a slight improvement my point is made, and after that try it with another piece of gear, each piece sorbothanized will add to the final audible results...At the End for me it is a better upgrade than changing my amp for another amp, or changing my headphone....If what you possess is already good try it, and you will hear the truly optimal potential of your actual possession... For sure some headphone gain more with the sorb, application than with other...I dont think that the massive well made enclosure of the Utopia will greatly change with the sorb. but the Stax headphone and Hifiman yes....For the other piece of gear i am without any doubt certain that they will improve, any of them... For the first time in my short audio life of 4 years, i dont rage about frustration with each upgrading new product on the market, my actual gear now is truly satisfying...Without sorbothane NO, absolutely not,nor my Staxes, nor my hifiman had satisfy me completely before...Now they satisfy me , modulo some modification and sorb.

    p.s. the two method like you say of mass loading and dissipation of vibration into heat are different but with the sorb. duro 70 it is necessary to add some load to compress it for an optimal result hence combining the two methods...
     
    Last edited: Sep 29, 2016
  7. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    Why not try a lower durometer polyurethane, like 30 shore-A? It wouldn't require mass loading lower mass components just so you can use 70 shore-whatever-you're using.

    Also, for anyone that wants to fart around with this stuff for cheap-ish, go to McMaster.com and search for polyurethane rubber bumpers/sheets in a durometer suitable to the mass of the component or targeted absorption frequency.

    IMHO, I found better results using the cheapo blue or cork HVAC isolation pads (also available on McMaster, tho not as cheap as some of the supply houses that sell through Amazon). Subjectively, bass tightened up, and sub-bass had less overhang/higher frequency harmonic ringing.
     
  8. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    I am guessing that mass loading + high duro still has advantage over lower duro. The reason is simple, the heavier the object, the less wobbling it is. Take for example a car that has a full tank(heavier) or full with passengers will feel more stable going over bumpy road and less likely to resonate. A empty tank car with just the driver will feel more shaky going over bumpy road and will take longer to stablize itself.

    This is just a simple deduction but there's more to this(e.g. how your weights are distributed, some audio equipment are heavier on one side due to placement of the electrical transformers) which will determine how rock stable(low recoil, fast recovery) your isolation is.
     
  9. AllanMarcus

    AllanMarcus Friend

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    isn't there a point, though, where the device is simply stable?
     
  10. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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  11. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    If your audio equipment is visibly vibrating, the whole house probably needs sorbothane! \/

    I remember reading, a few years ago, about a super-stable free-from-outside-interference, laboratory environment that was a huge, major engineering project. Of course, I immediately imagined a turntable sitting on it!

    Here's a platform that is entirely unsuited to turntables, but the audiophile sitting on it is still smiling. Maybe he has sorbothane balls

    :sail:

    .​
     
  12. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    well, there are kinda two basic "camps" in effective resonance management, low-Q and high-Q. either shoot for high stiffness and low mass (underdamped), or low stiffness and high mass (overdamped). Think, the difference between a Rega RP-10 and VPI Classic.

    basically, you're either trying to lower the resonant frequency (with low amplitude, but high force) to a point where it's inaudible through mass coupling, or you're trying to raise the resonant frequency (with higher amplitude, but lower force) to a point where it's "easier" to damp that resonance.

    Good resonance management usually mixes these two ideas based on the targeted resonant frequency. google-fu "constrained layer damping".

    edit - flip flopped amplitude and force
     
  13. richard51

    richard51 Mr. Sorbothane

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    Precisely my experience and my point about sorbothane, it act on bass and highs improvement and in the mids also, WHY ? because sorbothane absorb some negative resonance resulting of the interacting parts of the electronics and manifesting by negative resonance from the enclosure, transforming them into heat and not only isolating like many other products... This " plastic" is specially invented for that, not the other so call "isolation" product... My only other point is that with many experiments, we discovered that duro 70 preferably compressed with a load produce by a long way the better audio results... The upgrading effect were for me more than satisfying.... Debating without experimenting is futile...I only wrote to all here because i want to give the necessary impulse to experiment and to try a low cost solution to all gear vibration plague, reversible solution, with an amazing return in audiophile results.... Bashing the message without experimenting, or just to give an unfunded opinion is sterile... try it , duro 70, with some experiment to establishing the right amount of load, you will see.... Remember that my results are a cumulative effects on my 10 pieces of gear.... Read about sorb. and his particular physical and chemical properties, and you will understand his audible effects...Now my message is done... Thanks to all and best regards........
     
  14. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    yeah, what I'm saying is that you're treating your resonances by mass coupling and damping. that's one way to do it. but there's also other ways, too. Another way to think of "acceptable" resonance managemnt is how speakers like Audio Note, Harbeth, some Spendor models do. Lightweight-ish, rigid cabinets with effectively no damping. Less is more, here. I'm pretty sure Peter Qvortrup would tell you that plastering sorbothane all over a pair of speakers is gonna suck the life out of them.
     
  15. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    Isn't speaker-cabinet design about stopping resonances, with bracing and build --- except for rare instances where the resonance is designed in. Excuse me if this is mis-remembered rubbish --- but I think I recall something about those BBC Monitor cabinets being supposed to resonate.

    By the way: the massively isolated lab setup I vaguely remembered earlier was for a scanning tunnelling microscope at Cornell.
     
  16. yotacowboy

    yotacowboy McRibs Kind of Guy

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    That's exactly what I was referring to—often speakers are designed to function sympathetically to driver resonances or cabinet resonances. IOW, don't fight it, use it. It's like resonance jiujitsu.
     
  17. Madaboutaudio

    Madaboutaudio Friend

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    Last edited: Oct 1, 2016
  18. AllanMarcus

    AllanMarcus Friend

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    1. Based on the vibration transmission characteristics, insulator works effectively to drain out the inner origin vibration of equipment and to prevent outside origin one.
    2. Electrical noise is induced by airborne sound and the insulator can reduce vibration induced on the equipment and its noise.
    3. The insulator improves the S/N, sound quality and summing localization of reproduced stereophonic sound.
    So 2 is not relevant to headphone amps. From my read of the article one is just a non issue. As for three, I didn't see if the testing was DBT.

    Someone show me measurements or a DBT that shows that SQ improves SS equipment sound reproduction using vribration crontrol beyond basic stuff included with the equipment.
     
  19. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    If and when it's designed in. and good.

    I'm not a great fan of Mr J Atkinson, but I remember a a fragment of a video in which he showed some very resonant-cabinet speakers, and how it didn't matter with a lot of music. Then he played some piano through them and :eek: .

    In most cases, The only good speaker is a dead speaker! :D.

    But frankly, for people without an obsessively designed, dedicated listening room, why don't we just forget about resonance! Why? Never mind the hifi components, look around you! Consider how much the china on the shelf is contributing to the sound. Yes, it is... and, except when sharp ears pick up a particularly audible example, we don't even think about it. But if we are going to think resonance, we should start with the rest of the room. Damn it, some people even put things on top of speakers! :(
     
  20. zonto

    zonto Friend

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    In my experience with the Val2, the only time I got tinging was when I used microphonic tubes. For me, it happened even upon headphone jack insertion/removal or volume change when I used single-wire getter 6N23P tubes from the late 80s. Moving to a pair from 1969 fixed the problem entirely for me as the earlier production tubes used a double-wire getter.

    Get that DBT crap out of here. This isn't the HF sound science forum. :p Conclusion 2 could be relevant for headphone amps placed on a desk given vibration that may come in via typing and/or computer fans, etc..

    I refuse to go full nervosa mode with isolation products and have no experience with sorbothane. However, I use products from Herbie's Audio Lab (HAL) to provide some isolation under my transport, DAC, and headphone amp on my cheap, made-in-China living room TV stand with glass shelves.

    A few quips from the HAL main FAQ relevant to the discussion:
    • Rubber/Sorbothane:
      • Stock footers: "Rubber doesn't conduct energy well; worse, it conducts energy at some frequencies, absorbs at others, and stores and releases energy at other frequencies. In other words, a rubber or Sorbothane foot acts as a kind of passive equalizer/phase shifter. Also, because rubber has non-linear storage and release characteristics, it can interfere with and distort important time information by introducing spurious group-delay characteristics back into your system. ‑from Symposium USA."
      • "Although they damp vibrations, most rubbery audio products respond too slowly to microphonic compression and decompression for superior audio resolution. . . . Soft polyurethanes like Sorbothane and Norsorex lack the reflexive counter-punch needed to fight microphonics and have a tendency to produce ill-defined bass and some high-frequency loss or false emphasis."
    • Cones: "Instead of acting as vibration barriers or absorbers, cones act as conduits to 'drain' vibrations away. Components working well with rigid devices are basically in a state of vibrational equilibrium rather than being truly isolated and are dependent on the integrity of the shelf or platform they are used with. Particular 'sonic signatures' and glare are quite common, though. (The idea of draining vibration from a component into a rack which in turn supports other components is in itself a perplexity. A loudspeaker spiked to the floor will generate floor-borne vibrations that will subsequently reverberate vibrations right back up the spikes the way they came, imposing glare and distortion into the music. Likewise with a component spiked to a shelf or platform. In audio applications, the idea of 'draining' vibrations works better in theory than in actual practice.)"
    • HAL footer products: "Herbie's compliant feet are molded from proprietary blends of platinum-cured silicones and inorganic fillers. The blended materials have a strategic balance of compatibility and incompatibility, resulting in strong viscoelastic compounds that never fully cure and achieve incredible vibration-absorbing and vibration-blocking ability. . . . Herbie's isolation feet . . . decouple and isolate components and work well with just about any kind of shelf or platform."
    • Mass loading: "Placing a moderate amount of weight on a component usually helps isolation feet to perform most efficiently (choice of material is critical, though; inappropriate materials can introduce unwanted resonance). As opposed to rigid coupling devices that often require heavy weights for mass-loading, components sitting on compliant feet usually work best with just a small amount of weight . . . ." HAL sells these stabilizers.
    At the end of the FAQ, there are vibration measurements of a steel shelf on (1) carbon feet, (2) HAL "Tenderfeet," and (3) HAL Tenderfeet with two stabilizers on top of the steel shelf. They're obviously effective at vibration control. Couldn't bring myself to buy stabilizers to try, but may next year after I upgrade my electronics, etc.
     

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