Plinth advice

[diviy]

Looking for ideas to make a plinth for a
SP10 . I am wondering if ply could be used ?

[walpurgis]

Yes you can use plywood, good quality birch multi layer ply is decent. It's a bit lively when it comes to resonance, but can be helped with a thin sheet of alternative material bonded to the underside with contact adhesive in 'constrained layer' fashion.

The list of materials for plinth building is endless really :).

[Sherwood]

31050


I made these plinths for my Maggie 1.7s out of 25mm MDF. Amazingly solid.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Hi Gerald,

I got your PM. No, I've not done a plinth for a SP10, but the general consensus of opinion is to try 25mm Panzerholz (expensive to import), this, reputedly has some of the best damping qualities. You could use Permali which is another variant, it's cheaper, available in the UK but not quite as good as Panzerholz. Any wood used will damp to a certain extent, Shindo used Cherrywood in his plinths for the 301. Birchply is a good place to start. You can even download or watch simulations of certain wood damping characteristics using Luthiers emulation simulators. Youtube is full of the stuff. Prepare to jump down a rabbit hole. Banzai!!

[guy]

This looks cool:
https://www.acoustand.co.uk/products/acoustand-technics-sp10-mk2-mk3-obsidian-inspired-bespoke-plinth-sysytem

Perhaps use as inspiration for your own construction - Delrin/ply or MDF ?

[helma]

Most woods work more or less OK, including plywood. MDF supposedly has poor damping qualities. Bamboo is good, chipboard would be even slightly better (higher damping factor) & is very cheap, but it's not that fun to work with and a pain to get a good finish on. Panzerholz & permali have very high damping factors. I don't think you can go horribly wrong with birch ply. I made a plinth for my Denon DP-3000 using chipboard but TBH I'm not over the moon with it, but might be limitation of the TT rather than plinth.

Since DD units produce so little energy by themselves, I don't think the plinth matters nearly as much as with something like a Lenco / Garrard etc. which have a lot more vibration coming from the TT itself. FWIW with my DP-3000 I initially run it skeletal with no plinth, just an armboard fastened directly to the drive unit, to check everything worked OK, and can't say I noticed much difference (for better or worse) with the heavy chipboard plinth. It sounds pretty good, but for example using the Denon DA-305 arm on both the Denon and the Lenco, they are about on par with each other, but FR-54 on the Lenco sounds better than either, while FR-54 on the Denon doesn't really yield much benefit. I have no idea why really, the DP-3000 is very silent, has excellent speed stability etc. but the Lenco with the FR-54 just has better detail & sound stage and all those audiophile things.

For proper constrained layer damping I think you need a 'softer' inner layer and harder outer layers both sides (up & down) and AFAIK 'stuff' (turntable & arm) should be fastened to the softer layer to get the proper CLD effect. It's been years since I read about it though, I had plans to make such a plinth but eventually did not.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Plinth design is a massive black hole of ideas and falsehoods. I mean do you couple or decouple a motor or tonearm boards, good solid arugments for both. That's just one example of a variable. Personally, I think damping qualities of the plinth material are very important. I have one plinth which is a fully coupled design but yet I've added selective damping with panzerholz, the other is a decouple motor design and again I've selectively damped with panzerholz. Both perform very well. It's very tough. The only thing I can suggest is to have lots of fun, don't get frustrated, learn from your experiments. Don't worry about what other people say, or criticise. The only thing that really matters is that you've got something which sounds excellent IN YOUR SYSTEM!!