[Puma Cat]

Originally Posted by Beet Farmer

Interesting analysis in there...
One point from me about the discussion of what is UNDER the Maple board and my experiences with exotic wood and hard Maple butcher blocks.
I acquired a variety of sizes and thickness Maple butcher blocks and a few Walnut butcher blocks.
Using only listening... no high tech stuff. The sort of thing the butcher blocks were ON TOP OF, and also what was between the blocks and the OEM equipment feet mattered a great deal.
My experiement ware based on hte notion of TUNING rather than eliminating vibrations.
Taking the exaple of a violin. THe strings, mounted on a non resonant structure, and played would sound not so hot. Stick them back on top of a carefully designed resonant box. and magic.
Well the same notion can be applied to the vibrations around audio equipment.
I added a lot of various bits of exotic wood under my equipment in various combinations over a few months of experimenting. And the results are good.
The ony problem is the results are certainly not transferable!
THings like for my amplifier. THe base Maple 3: by 19"by 18" block with a Walnut 3" 14x17" on it. In top of that in back a 12" long 2" square spindle of Verawood. in front a pair of 2" by 4x4" blocks of Bolivian Rosewood With the amp on top of those. in it's OEM feet. Many variations did not sound as good as this on.
In my setup my room.
So the area of what is UNDER your gear is wide open.. Scary but true.

Hi Beet Farmer,
Thanks for your comments and sharing your experiences. Yes, I've had similar results when using maple boards on top of my audio rack's top shelf, and placing components on it, as well. I did a DOE a while back and found that using hard wooden blocks under a maple board worked better in reducing vibration of the maple board than using the Diversitech closed-cell foam & rubber footers, for example. The Diversitech footers appears to be acting like an undamped spring. I haven't done the comparison yet, but I have a hypothesis is the more traditional cork & rubber AVPs would work better than the Diversitech AVPs for audio component isolation (or at least for placing maple boards on).