Turntable / Vinyl Accessories & Furniture

I've gone through this thread, plus a couple others related to audio furniture, and so far I think I've only seen one reference to a wall mounted shelf unit.

My house was built in the 1950s and construction is substandard in many respects. Floor joists are 2x8 spanning 11'. The floors don't squeak like on poorly constructed newer homes, but they flex. The flooring is red oak strip T & G. The walls are 2x4 construction, covered in wallboard, steel lath and plaster.

My speakers weight about 85 pounds each and the spiked feet are directly on the hardwood floor now. All of my components are on a coffee table that's pushed up against the wall, between the speakers. There's nothing isolating the table from the floor. When playing music from the turntable, it doesn't take much to cause the woofers to pulsate from low frequencies. Standing a few feet away from the turntable and just shifting my weight, flexes the floor enough to cause the woofers to pulse.

So, I need to come up with something much better. I could move the turntable, phono stage and Freya preamp farther away from the speakers and run longer XLR cables to the power amps, but the turntable still needs to be isolated from the floor. I also could put the speakers on something like Herbie's feet (or preferably a cheaper alternative).

I'm thinking about building a three shelf system that would be wall mounted (to an exterior facing wall). The shelves would be roughly 40" W x 18" D x 1-1/2". The top shelf would have a second 40" W x 16" D x 1-1/2" shelf "floating" above it, suspended by six racquetballs, that would sit in bored out cups in both the mounted and floating shelves. That top floating shelf would be space for up to two turntables. The middle shelf would be for Freya, phono stages, and maybe Yggdrasil. The bottom shelf would be for the pair of Aegir power amps, and there would also be space between them for Yggdrasil.

Thoughts on the whole wall mount idea? 40" wide allows me to anchor into three studs. I'm thinking that the cantilevered part of the three mounted shelves will be connected with threaded rod, much like many of you have done. What about the racquetball suspension idea for the turntable shelf? I'll do it in a way so that only about 1" of the racquetball will be visible between the top shelf and the floating shelf. I could even make the floating shelf 2-1/4" thick to give it more mass, although a little testing might be in order to determine if six racquetballs is adequate for that amount of weight.

 

I think wall mount is the only way. Interested to see how yours turns out. We just moved into a 2 story and having serious footfall issues now in my room. I don't welcome the idea but I dont think racquet balls have improved anything in my case. That or get DD turntables better suited to handle external vibration.

 

I am getting a new DD turntable, an SL-1500C is coming on Tuesday, which weighs about 9 pounds more than the TT I have now.

How are you using racquetballs? Maybe I got the idea from you, although I though I saw them mentioned on a Steve Hoffman forum. Do you have a high mass shelf resting on them, which then has your TT on top of it?

 

Vibrapods are $6 each and very effective under a bamboo cutting board as a floating platform, I use 4 of the #2 for my 20lb TT. Solid improvement for the $50 invested

Wall mounting will be the most effective way to isolate, make sure your shelf is deep enough for the dust cover to fully open.

And when you get your shelf lumber and hardware remember to get a shovel to dig the rabbit hole deeper....

 

Here are squash balls, they are smaller than racquet balls and a bit less spongy. They don't do a whole lot IMO. A small tweak at best and not really a solution to the problem.

 

Going back to the days when the turntable was providing music for a bunch of hippies to dance to, I'd say that wall shelf was the only way to go. But those were brick walls, and the last time I advised it to someone, he replied that his walls were frame walls, and it wouldn't work for him. Looks like you are in the same situation.

Assuming you don't have to protect the setup from leaping kids, and given the sensitivity you are describing, I think that you should go all out and get an isolation table. You can play with cutting balls in half for free, but when it comes to spending money, you could spend as much on experimenting with various things as just getting a good isolating table in the first place.

I've never used one. I've never felt the need. And I'm one of those people that considers most vibration protection, funny spikes, etc, to be audiophoolery...except for turntables. Drum your fingertips lightly on one, you'll probably hear it from the speakers. These things work by vibrations.

(I'm so much that sort of a person that a friend thought I was taking the piss when I praised his isolation table! But no: it was under a turntable )

 

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe 1.25" diameter Sorbothane hemisphere feet in 50 durometer would make the most sense. They are rated for 5-10 pounds per foot.

 

I think that with the construction of my current house, wall mounted will still be better that anything on the floor. The plastered walls adds some mass and since it will be an exterior wall, it's connected to the foundation and hopefully less likely to be impacted by the flexible floor structure. I think it will good enough, and far better than what I have now. I also don't play music at crazy volumes.

My next house will be one level and have a concrete floor.

I may also cut down the size so that it's designed for just one turntable. 22" wide is enough for a turntable, it's wide enough for my Yggdrasil / Freya stack, and it's wide enough for the pair of Aegir amps with about 4" of space between them.

 

I use some sorbothane pads I bought off Amazon a while back, and that seems to take care of my issues with vibration getting to the 'table. It's a big improvement in my case, the cabinet that this is on is pretty light and now I hear nothing through the 'table when I hit the top of the cabinet

I don't think this will help your case though, and like the others said - wall mounting is the best bet.

 

A few weeks ago my father-in-law and I made a threshold out of walnut for our house. I had a pretty big chunk of off-cut left and decided to make a record sleeve holder to display what’s playing now. I’m going to coat it with Odie’s Oil.

 

This is a good reminder to get my dado sled finished. Simple design, looks great. By the way, does the LP art tell us which swimsuit Robert chooses to wear? Dude's clearly jazzed about his options.

 

Robert ultimately went with a sensible one piece that wasn’t pictured.

I actually got that record as packing material for a Heatmiser album I ordered and had it handy when I was cutting the groove. I don’t have a dado stack so I made two overlapping cuts with my regular saw blade. It ended up being about one and three quarters width of the saw blade’s kerf, which should be enough for most sleeves I reckon.

 

These are on deep discount at the moment: standard height and xheight models are $170 off.

 

Wow ! Good prices on those, gettem while you can.

 

Step 2



For the past 5 years or so, I have been using a variation on the tnt-audio 'FleXy' DIY turntable stand. When I got the Micro Seiki BL-111 turntable, the first priority was replacing old capacitors, motor bearings, and setting up and lubing everything properly. The BL-111 is a beast and was too wide for the FleXy stand, so step 1.5 was to modify the FleXy so it was wide enough for the BL-111 to fit. But once I got the BL-111 sitting on the FleXy it felt a bit unstable. It probably would have been OK, but that's a lot of weight and didn't feel right. I did remove the rubber washers on the lower shelves and tightened up the 'squeeze' on the shelves and that helped, but I still felt like the Micro deserved better.

As an aside, I have become enamored of high stiffness and high density over damping in audio structures. Every structure has resonances but outside of the resonances, high mass and high stiffness do an excellent job of rejecting vibration. The tradeoff becomes high peak resonance in low damping structures versus wider frequency resonance with a lower peak in structures with higher damping. I have come to the opinion that high stiffness, high density structures with low damping sound more natural and too much damping can muddy the waters.

Having tried mdf, I wanted to try natural hardwood for shelves. Mdf stands live at the reasonable end of the market. Above that and the price jumps significantly. At the high end are HRS, etc. for obscene money. In the middle, you find the wood racks mostly made of maple and walnut. Atacama, timbernation, and butcherblockacoustics for example. At 34 inch (86 cm) height I wanted, the only way to make a rack from those 3 was to have a 4 shelf unit or something custom made. That rapidly put the price over $1000 for something big enough to hold the Micro.

Machine tools use grey cast iron for machine bases because low cost, high stiffness, high density, and damping that is high for metal. It turns out that cast iron legs are available and some of them also look nice. So I made up this turntable stand out of cast iron legs from Rusty Designs out of Canada, a 24” x 18” x 3” top shelf, and 19” x 18” x 1.5” lower shelves that are hard maple audio platforms from butcherblockacoustics. Brass threaded inserts, some homemade L brackets made from 3/4” thick aluminum, and some adjustable feet connect everything together. All in it weighs 134 pounds (61 kg) and is subjectively stiff as hell. And it does well in the tap a finger test.

Finally, the cost was about $760 plus some metal that I already had in house. Next up is building some turntable isolation feet based on an idea I got from off-road racing buggies. Or maybe a tonearm swap. Or maybe a cartridge swap. Or maybe I'll just listen to records. I love the way it sounds.