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Wooden blocks under amps... do they make a difference?

12K views 47 replies 20 participants last post by  8086 
#1 ·
I was at my local "audiophile" HT shop and they had some beautiful looking equipment in there.

But I noticed these wooden blocks underneath amps in the home theater rooms. They looked almost
like butcher blocks. Big slaps of Maple underneath the amps. So you know I had to ask...

"What are those for?"

"Those are amplifier blocks, the improve the sound." The sales said it with a straight face. So of course I asked how. And he told me they block vibrations and isolate the component. And they certainly look like they did. But it kinda felt like Audio Snake Oil like the $100 RCA cables hanging on the wall in the place.

But then I started wondering, do these things actually work? I could see if it was somekind of tube AMP, but these were under some beefy Parasounds.

Has anybody else seen these things, or better yet experienced them? I would love to put the signals from one of these amps through an oscilloscope to be sure.
 
#2 ·
An amplifier that is sensitive to microphonic vibration pickup might benefit from SOME kind of isolation, like some tube amps. This is the first I have heard of a slab of wood, although with the markup it makes sense that someone would get around to pushing it. Wish I had, although my conscience would not let me sleep well.

With solid state electronics, I am aware of no benefit from vibration isolation. With tube amps, turntables, and maybe CD changers..... MAYBE.

Then wood seems like a poor performer. You want some combination of:
  1. Mass. Think granite block. Lots of mass to absorb energy.
  2. Springiness. Something soft, fluffy, springy, to allow vibration on one side and not transmit it to the other side.
If you use both, then you have the potential makings of a resonant system, so the combination has to be designed to work together.

There are lots of fun products out there claiming to help. I am not a believer in any of them... except for one maglev thing that just looks cool. Others may claim otherwise.....

This is in reference to electronics. Speaker isolation, while not clearcut, is another discussion altogether.
 
#3 ·
Wooden blocks certainly do make a difference and it is measurable. They increase height.

As for sound quality, I would have to agree with AudiocRaver.

But we could do a little speculating... Adding blocks might increase ventilation. For amps running under conditions that are near thermal limits one might actually avoid that very opaque sound that comes with activation of thermal protection. Or for an amp that runs better at a slightly higher temp, such as one using MosFet outputs, you might argue that it would not sound as good with a lower operating temperature because of the ventilation. I am sure Brian could come up with a modification by applying some of his materials used for room treatments to solve that problem.

:D
 
#6 ·
Wood transmits vibrations. Look at violins and acoustic guitars, The wood determines the musical tone, they are not vibration absorbers.

I use these to put air gaps between my equipment stack. Get them at Lowes.

http://www.benchdog.com/bench-cookie.cfm
Paint those shiny black and you could sell them for $300 each at audiophile events. ;)

I just returned from the NY Audio Show and there were plenty of wood discs and hyper-expensive machined feet, errrr, "isolation products" that looked very dubious.
 
#10 ·
Wow... The sales person is just that.. a sales person with no clue to the fundamental principles of amplification, electronics, or electricity for that matter. Run far away from him as he's only interested in your money. Nothing else. For SS amps, I will categorically say NO SONIC improvement.
 
#15 ·
Years ago when I had my Audible Illusions tube preamp... I experimented with cables, tubes, dampeners, and racks. I found that all of the above made a dif but the biggest was the rack and how each part was suspended ie. sorbothane, spikes etc. When I moved to a Classe DR6 preamp (solid State) I found that none of the above made any dif. IMO it makes no dif if you are using decent cables and have a solid rack to set your equipment on... except if you use a tube preamp or tube power amp. I believe the reason the Classe didn't care about the cables was the low input impedance.
 
#16 ·
Being as open minded as possible about it all:

There was a time when transformers - other than power transformers - were found more commonly in audio gear at input stages, and could sometimes have some microphonic sensitivity to vibration. Also, rarely, optical isolators for analog signals could be made from discrete components and be microphonically sensitive. Some vintage gear might benefit from vibration isolation devices, but as has been pointed out, wood wouldn't (hey, a pun!) be the best material.

With the modern components used in 99.9% of the gear we deal with - other than tubes (and a good design minimizes this) - it is not an issue. And wood is the wrong material.
 
#18 ·
Just get some old hockey pucks, it will achieve the same thing.
 
#27 ·
This is the craziest thing about marketing "high end" wood blocks... how can they possibly argue against you making your own? I can see the case for precision milled titanium, or graphite or some exotic material... but a slab of wood? I think most people can handle that on their own. :huh:

I sat in on a demo for one of the big name companies with similar products. I think if I remember correctly they had a few different performance levels that the rep sequentially introduced while playing a segment of music over and over. The rep would say things like "can you hear the bass tighten up?" ... I just kept quiet because I couldn't tell a difference between any of them, and everyone else in the room seemed to be smiling and nodding, or waving cash at him.
 
#34 ·
The center foot thing is advertised by Yamaha but I pay little creedance to that particular part. What makes the Adventage line so good is the symmetrical layout of the channels with respect to one another. From the performance measurements that I've seen by various reviewers, it delivers the goods. You'll be hard pressed to find a pre-amp that will match the performance of the pre-amp sections found in the Adventage series regardless of cost.
 
#46 ·
There are many questions raised by these products. What is the reasoning behind triangular notches in the cable lifters. Seems to me that it should be a parabolic design for maximum effect.

Also, should we even be discussing these products in a public forum? If word gets out, imagine the environmental impact of a run on these. We could decimate the population of myrtle trees in Oregon. And are these myrtle trees organically grown, under natural conditions, or are these genetically modified myrtles? And what of the loggers that harvest them? Are they paid a fair wage? Are they legal immigrants or are the surreptitiously recruited in Canada and brought in to take jobs from American workers?

I like the idea of using recycled hockey pucks instead. Maybe they won't sound quite as good as myrtle, but at least I could sleep at night. Besides, Mech probably has a garage full of them and all they need is to have the teeth removed.
 
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