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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: Macondo 3.0
Post Subject: Not a problem at all.Posted by Romy the Cat on: 7/2/2023
 Paul
S wrote: |
| Am I the only one who wonders about parking the amps on the woofers? |
|
From the point of view of a methodological purity indeed the location of a vacuum
tube amplifier atop of midbass section does not make any sense. But also, exists
the empirical practice. I did not experiment with this bass bin, but I did those
experiments with my former bass bins that were 4 time smaller. As you remember I
use the same amps location from 2016. Nope, I did not listen the sound of the amplifiers
siring on the floor vs the amps sitting atop bass enclosure, but I was listening
via stethoscope on the amplifiers chassis if hear the bone vibrations from
woofer. I can testify that I never was able to hear it.
I did not try otherwise by
here and before my upload fire was over sitting atop of a black platform that
you can see on the picture. It is a custom-made vibration decoupling platform made
for me by Kevin from Silent Running Audio. The platform is made for the specific
weight and weight distribution of the amp and has two separate parts. The
bottom part that is sitting on the bass bin is basically a fancy piece of wood.
The top part that hosts the amplifier is floating over the bottom part. Whan, I
say floating it is not literally, but I mean that it has some sort of decoupling.
There was lot of talk in audio media that Keving used some super patented and
super secretive technologies that were used in USA submarines to decouple noise
producing elements of the sub from the sub’s hull. I think that is BS that
audio writers invented. In reality, I am not sure how it worked, even though I spoke
with Kevin in length. I might do not remember correctly but he used a hydraulic
decoupling, and the liquid are special chemicals that detect vibrations and change
own viscosity, effectively offsetting the vibration resonance.
I got the platforms from
Keving in 2000 for my ML2s and I never use my amps without them, luckily the ML2
and Milq have the same weight and mass distribution. I did some experiments
with them back in 2001 and all my experiments ended one day. I put the beautifully
sound Micro Seiki RX-5000 atop of SRA platform and it was an absolute magic:
the turntable lost bass and not just “become worse” but it lost probably 20db
at the bottom. It was a truly a “holly shit experience” and I instantly understood
that somehow the SRA platforms worked. I invited the statoscope to approach later
when I designed the Melquiades chassis. I still feel that even the presence of some
bone vibration does not necessarily impact sound in a predicable negative way. If
you hard couple a mic to your tonearm body and with MC cartridge and blast the full
volume of your playback (I did) then on s scope of the mic feed, you will see
that it picks up a lot of air vibrations. So, how to deal with it?
Anyhow, I do feel that there
is a lot of truly actionable problems that I would like to deal with my playback,
and I do not feel that the apps siting atop of the midbass bins is one of them.
Perhaps my pride of building the 6ch Melquiades and my pleasure to look on it overrides
my sense of methodological audio purity. Perhaps. But I am confronted with the
fact the if I do not hear anything with a statoscope then there is nothing to worry
about. It might be a good idea to add a
vibration sensor to the amp and to see objectively what is going on but I feel
that a pursuit of “perfection” frequently mans a paralysis of progress and have
other objectives to chase. Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site