| Vibration Control [message #91382] |
Tue, 28 January 2020 09:56  |
Barryso
Messages: 205
Registered: May 2009
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This is an odd one. Chalk it up to being semi retired, bored and having a lot of scrap shower pan liner. The liner is left over from making gaskets for the 4 pi woofers and horns.
Last year I put together the Whammy headphone amp as a preamp. It's an inexpensive kit available on the DIYAudio website, designed by Wayne Colburn of Pass Labs, and it's a very good unit for very little money.
There's supposed to be a chassis available but that hasn't happened yet. So the circuit board has long computer motherboad standoffs holding it up on a piece of baltic birch.
When it first got put together I figured there should be isolation between the birch and the standoffs. So I put folded paper towel pieces between the standoffs and the birch ... but got indifferent results. It changed the sound but it wasn't definitively better. Gave up on it.
Well after making gaskets for the 4 pi's there was a great deal of scrap ... so it was time to futz. Cut some squares to put between the Whammy standoffs and the wood, gave it a listen and thought it to be an improvement. It was modest but when you removed it you could clearly hear it's absence.
Added another layer of squares and it changed again ... and adding more layers changed it a bit more. The presentation with layers of shower pan liner is clearer and it's removed a bit of smearing.
Listened for a week and have to admit I was pretty pleased with myself.
Next up, a DIY tube preamp. It has the brackets for the tube board in direct contact with the steel chassis so it seemed reasonable to try the same magic shower pan liner between the chassis and the brackets.
Yup, cleaned up a bit of grunge. Guess vibration control makes more sense on a tube preamp than a solid state but it's clearly audible on both units. The tube preamp got built about 20 years ago and it never occurred to me to attack vibration in the chassis. Had used a lot of inexpensive things under the chassis, some of which sounded good, but never did anything internally.
Shazam!
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