I’ve seen and read a lot about putting things under or over our equipment and have started doing some of that myself.
My first eye opening experience was when I added Gaia footers to my speakers. Second was when I added Stage 1 footers under my subwoofers.
I spent a little bit of time managing foot steps causing my record player to skip. Upgrading players certainly helped, but what stepped it up even further was mounting the cabinet tightly to the wall with strong angle brackets. Since then I’ve played with platforms and weight loading, both of which have damped my finger taps substantially.
Since then I’ve been adding things under or over my components with the goal of further damping vibrations. I have IsoAcoustics stuff, doorstoppers, 4x4x2 steel ingots, Herbie’s discs some Auralex platforms coming in and more.
At some point, I stopped associating these further increments to any improvements in sound. Just figured more is better and kept iterating.
Then I learned that there are apps that I can download to my phone to measure vibrations… I like Vibrometer for Android because it runs in the background and locks screen on.
So, I started measuring by moving my phone between components from measure to measure in the music. Most of my components measure zero vibration at normal listening levels. Only at ear shattering levels do small blips measure.
And those blips are interesting. Where I don’t have some kind of vibration damping beneath a component, it registers 2-3x higher magnitude of vibration on hard bass hits. And now it’s got me wondering if this microvibrations are causing microcurrents in the various high current things sitting on the ground like unraised wires, iso transformers, regenerators and amps.
Anyway, I thought I’d share my latest exploration since I now have a tool to help visualize the vibrations.