[nature boy]

For those of you into the vinyl thing, I have been experimenting with tweaks to improve my Nottingham Interspace turntable set up.  Several vinyl inmates at AA had good results placing Rega turntables on spiked IKEA Lack Side tables.

My dedicated listening room is located in a refinished basement with speakers and my equipment rack spiked thru a heavy berber carpet to the concrete floor, so no need for a wall rack.

Overall midrange clarity was improved, more defined placement of instruments within the soundstage, and microdynamics were captured better.  My guess is that isolating the turntable separately from other equipment helped as well.

The table costs $9.95 and very easy to put together.  I just drilled four straight holes in the leg to insert some old speaker stand spikes.  

On a side note, I also noticed some improvement by slipping three mouse pads under the Nottingham Interspace motor housing.  This helps to reduce a small amount of vibration picked up by the tonearm & cartridge.

NB

[Ferdi]

That's a fairly old trick but many have had good results with it. I have also been to Ikea tonight. I picked up a rubberwood chopping block that I intend to use as a shelve in a rack. I got only one to figure out how exactly to use it. Probably I'll build a flexy-type rack using 3 blocks for my 2nd system.

Good luck with other tweaks.

[randytsuch]

Hi NB,
Actually, I have seen a thread at Audiogon, and follow ups at AA about a rack made out of Ikea Lack tables.  You use a Lack table per shelf, and cut the legs down to the size you want.  The only issue was on the newer Lack tables, the legs are hollow, so you need to fill them in with something at the ends.  After you fill in the ends, you put in shallow spikes in the ends, and then stack the tables.  This gives spiked isolation between each shelf.  You should use shallow spikes, because deep spikes dig in to the tops of the table.  An alternative was to put a coin under the spike.  I also saw where someone put a ring around the spike, to try to make the tables more stable.

This was originally offered at Audiogon as an alternative to the Flexirack, that would be just as cheap and easy, but would sound better.  The author said the construction of the Lack tables was good for isolation of audio gear.  I thought about building one, but my wife wants a rack that looks like ?furniture?, and this would not really fit her definition of furniture.

Randy