Jump to content
IGNORED

Are You Using Rolleballs, RollerBlocks ??


Recommended Posts

I have a few sets of Symposium Rollerblocks. I’ve tried them in various configurations, and by far the best use of them was under my Fritz standmounts; this resulted in significantly improved sense of clarity and bass quality (such as it was). Under various electronics I can’t say I noticed any obvious differences. Under a large butcher block used as a turntable base I thought I liked it at first but extended listening revealed a lack of focus and detail — perhaps being overdampened because the feet on the MoFi are spring loaded (designed by HRS) and probably don’t like extra dampening. I’ll try them with my new Triangle Art setup comming next week.

 

 

Link to comment

I have Ingress Engineering rollerblocks under most of my equipment. I used to use home built ones but these so much better and the price is very reasonable.

 

I did a lot of listening and found that I got better sound putting the rollerblocks under 1/2" thick slabs of aluminum and putting the components on the aluminum slabs than having the components directly on the rollerblocks. I don't put the aluminum directly on the balls, I glued polished stainless steel pieces under on the bottom of the aluminum slabs at the appropriate places. I use small shaving mirrors made for camping, they are available all over the place and make a fantastic surface to put on the roller balls.

 

This system works extremely well, the resonant frequency is quite low (about 1.5Hz) and the damping seems just about right. Because of the fairly high mass turning knobs etc is fine, much better than putting light weight components directly on the rollerblocks.

 

You DO have to have very flexible cables for connections that go off the slab. If you have two components on the same slab they can have stiff cables between them, but any cable going to a component not on the same slab needs a flexible cable. Stiff cables prevent the slab from moving freely, significantly reducing the effectiveness of the rollerblocks. I wound up making all my own cables to get high performance yet highly flexible cables.

 

This system yields a large increase in the "aliveness" of the sound, its rather stunning to listen to.

 

The only downside is that I don't have any vertical isolation yet. I've been designing several systems but have not been able to try any of them yet. I'm just getting my new shop building completed so now will have the tools to start trying some of these in the years to come.

 

John S.

Link to comment

I don't believe in the principle of these, but the audio friend nearby at one stage got very enthusiastic about them, for speakers. So I had a chance to hear them in action. Ummm, didn't like it - his speakers lost definition; a softer, perhaps some would call it a more pleasant sound - but the bass line lost its bite. Finally, he got rid of them, and has 'nailed' the speakers to the spot - a lot better, to my ears.

 

Also uses them under the amplifier - the huge problem with them is that they collect fine dust like a magnet. and immediately its behaviour goes down the gurgler; the ball is trying to climb over tiny bits of grit ... all one has to do is clean the cavity to hear what's happening ...

Link to comment

I use Symposium Rollerblocks, they make a surprisingly large difference for the better under everything I've ever tried them with.

Larger better focused soundstage, snappier transients, better micro dynamic contrast, and tighter/more articulate bass response.

One interesting positive effect is the ability to hear all of the same apparent detail at a relatively lower volume setting than usual, due to the improved dynamic contrast. 

They do perform differently and sound different with different platform and shelf materials or compositions, constrained layer damping seems to work best there.

Link to comment
4 hours ago, JohnSwenson said:

I have Ingress Engineering rollerblocks under most of my equipment. I used to use home built ones but these so much better and the price is very reasonable.

 

I did a lot of listening and found that I got better sound putting the rollerblocks under 1/2" thick slabs of aluminum and putting the components on the aluminum slabs than having the components directly on the rollerblocks. I don't put the aluminum directly on the balls, I glued polished stainless steel pieces under on the bottom of the aluminum slabs at the appropriate places. I use small shaving mirrors made for camping, they are available all over the place and make a fantastic surface to put on the roller balls.

 

This system works extremely well, the resonant frequency is quite low (about 1.5Hz) and the damping seems just about right. Because of the fairly high mass turning knobs etc is fine, much better than putting light weight components directly on the rollerblocks.

 

You DO have to have very flexible cables for connections that go off the slab. If you have two components on the same slab they can have stiff cables between them, but any cable going to a component not on the same slab needs a flexible cable. Stiff cables prevent the slab from moving freely, significantly reducing the effectiveness of the rollerblocks. I wound up making all my own cables to get high performance yet highly flexible cables.

 

This system yields a large increase in the "aliveness" of the sound, its rather stunning to listen to.

 

The only downside is that I don't have any vertical isolation yet. I've been designing several systems but have not been able to try any of them yet. I'm just getting my new shop building completed so now will have the tools to start trying some of these in the years to come.

 

John S.

I am happy with Yamamoto Sound Craft bases under my speakers. It is ebony, the same which is used to make musical instrumnents and it brings very human and musical tone. Tried bowls/bearings according to Barry Diament's idea. Most of resolution, but... cold and slightly out of tune.

Link to comment
21 hours ago, JohnSwenson said:

I have Ingress Engineering rollerblocks under most of my equipment. I used to use home built ones but these so much better and the price is very reasonable.

 

I did a lot of listening and found that I got better sound putting the rollerblocks under 1/2" thick slabs of aluminum and putting the components on the aluminum slabs than having the components directly on the rollerblocks. I don't put the aluminum directly on the balls, I glued polished stainless steel pieces under on the bottom of the aluminum slabs at the appropriate places. I use small shaving mirrors made for camping, they are available all over the place and make a fantastic surface to put on the roller balls.

 

This system works extremely well, the resonant frequency is quite low (about 1.5Hz) and the damping seems just about right. Because of the fairly high mass turning knobs etc is fine, much better than putting light weight components directly on the rollerblocks.

 

You DO have to have very flexible cables for connections that go off the slab. If you have two components on the same slab they can have stiff cables between them, but any cable going to a component not on the same slab needs a flexible cable. Stiff cables prevent the slab from moving freely, significantly reducing the effectiveness of the rollerblocks. I wound up making all my own cables to get high performance yet highly flexible cables.

 

This system yields a large increase in the "aliveness" of the sound, its rather stunning to listen to.

 

The only downside is that I don't have any vertical isolation yet. I've been designing several systems but have not been able to try any of them yet. I'm just getting my new shop building completed so now will have the tools to start trying some of these in the years to come.

 

John S.

 

Where do you source those aluminum slabs?

Link to comment

Two questions come to mind:

1] Do these or those or the other isolation devices actually isolate?

Now with high-tech cell-phones that have an accelerometer, we can measure the different devices. Just make a DIY shaker-table out of a large cheap sub-woofer.

2] Does a component need to be isolated?

While this is doubtful for anything but a turntable or a loudspeaker.  It too can be tested using that same DIY shaker-table sub-woofer.

Place the component on the shaker-table and record some quite music thru it, while playing a marching band thru the sub-woofer. Turn the sub on and off for short periods while doing the test.  Does the quite music change.

Link to comment

Nearly all components are too sensitive to vibration, for a variety of reasons. Main one being, the designers don't think it's necessary to worry about such; and also because it's very hard to measure the behaviour in a meaningful way to audio. How you deal with that is up to the individual - I work on stabilising the boxes by 'gluing' them to high mass, or damping vibrations.

Link to comment
On ‎6‎/‎17‎/‎2018 at 2:02 PM, Ralf11 said:

Are You Using Rolleballs, RollerBlocks? I'd like to get a sense of where people are with these add-on devices.

 

No, too expensive for me.

 

45 minutes ago, fas42 said:

Nearly all components are too sensitive to vibration, for a variety of reasons. Main one being, the designers don't think it's necessary to worry about such...

 

What about the factory installed isolation feet built into my components?

 

I see from the posts so far, some folks have sonic improvements using aftermarket isolation devices. I checked out the Symposium Rollerblocks and they are pretty expensive, starting at $499.00 for a set of three, and $649.00 for a set of four, that is more expensive than any of the individual audio components in my system. Doesn't seem like a logical move for me even if it slightly improves the sonics.

I have dementia. I save all my posts in a text file I call Forums.  I do a search in that file to find out what I said or did in the past.

 

I still love music.

 

Teresa

Link to comment

Manufacturer vibration control is typically lackluster —rubber feat, maybe rubber rings in metal feet. These probably come down to "better than nothing". Rollerblocks are great in theory handling horizontal axis vibrations, and they both decouple and dampen at the same time.

 

I’ve also tried the Mapleshade method of using thick maple butcher blocks with brass footers which was effective with my 845 SET but not obviously effective with other things I’ve tried it with.

 

The Rollerblocks I have are used, so I wonder if thier performance is compromised — I notice the mirror finishes in thier ball cups are somewhat tarnished.

Link to comment
25 minutes ago, Teresa said:

What about the factory installed isolation feet built into my components?

 

I see from the posts so far, some folks have sonic improvements using aftermarket isolation devices. I checked out the Symposium Rollerblocks and they are pretty expensive, starting at $499.00 for a set of three, and $649.00 for a set of four, that is more expensive than any of the individual audio components in my system. Doesn't seem like a logical move for me even if it slightly improves the sonics.

 

As GUTB stated, they may be inadequate. A tweak I forgot to mention with my first decent setup was that I removed the isolation feet, which were quite impressive, on my Yamaha CDP and used a trio of those aluminium cones, mild spikes, that were the rage at the time - by Mod Works??? This definitely seemed to help - part of the reason I used those was that a triangle of supports is aways inherently more stable than four - and they were placed right at the edge  of the metal enclosure, rather than under the base panel.

 

Another time I used viscoelastic material - memory foam - under that Yamaha to do some isolation. I have not really explored this side of things as much as others - I prefer to get inside the box and look for parts that might be sensitive to vibration, and 'fix' it there.

Link to comment
17 hours ago, fas42 said:

Nearly all components are too sensitive to vibration, for a variety of reasons.

I would say the exact opposite!

But there are some exceptions:

  • Turntables
  • Vacuum tubes
  • Sensitive input stages of phono and microphone pre-amps
  • Tonearm cables, microphone cables and musical instrument cables
  • Boutique capacitors

 

17 hours ago, fas42 said:

Main one being, the designers don't think it's necessary to worry about such; and also because it's very hard to measure the behaviour in a meaningful way to audio.

To the contrary, it's easy to measure the effectiveness of isolation devices and it's easy to do real listening tests of your hi-fi components.

Link to comment
20 hours ago, GUTB said:

 

Where do you source those aluminum slabs?

I got mine at Online Metals, they do custom cutting, but are expensive. At the time I had no tools for cutting my own.

 

You can get 1/2" aluminum on ebay for much less, but you don't get to choose the exact size.

 

Recently I found a place even in my small town that does metal fabrication and occasionally has scrap 1/2" aluminum that they are willing to cut to size for a LOT less than Online Metals.

 

John S.

Link to comment
6 hours ago, Speedskater said:

I would say the exact opposite!

But there are some exceptions:

  • Turntables
  • Vacuum tubes
  • Sensitive input stages of phono and microphone pre-amps
  • Tonearm cables, microphone cables and musical instrument cables
  • Boutique capacitors

 

To the contrary, it's easy to measure the effectiveness of isolation devices and it's easy to do real listening tests of your hi-fi components.

 

There are levels of sensitivity - it can be exceedingly obvious; there when you concentrate a bit more - or there all the time as a general degrading of the sound, a constant dirtying of what you're hearing.

 

The obvious stuff is easy to measure in terms of isloation devices "doing something", using some instrument - for the subtle issues, listening when the system is at a higher level of 'transparency', if you know what to listen for, makes it trivially easy to pick the variation in SQ.

Link to comment

If I want big lumps of heaviness, I go with large concrete pavers, the type you get at a gardening shop. Zero aesthetics, but they're cheap, and usable elsewhere if of no value in the rig! Good enough to try ideas with - the stands under the speakers of my first competent rig used these to make the column ...

Link to comment

Yes, I've been 'testing' the el cheapo type you also mentioned (ceramic doll saucers) - hence this thread

 

I didn't know you were using Al slabs; or are you?

 

And what happened to our vibration expert?  (I hate it when people have jobs...)

Link to comment
10 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

almost any town will have a sheet metal or other place with aluminum stock - or mail order it

 

you can cut it with hacksaw (labor) or a band saw or pay them to cut

 

I wonder how much it rings...

Vry good question. Thick aluminum is quite rigid so there are essentially no "bending" modes. The ringing is caused by Surface Acoustic Waves "SAW", these form standing waves between features of the aluminum surface. If you can block the standing waves from forming the SAW dissipate quickly. There are some standard approaches to doing this:

 

1: Non parallel sides, unfortunately us humans for some reason WANT to do rectangles etc with nice parallel sides which promote standing wave.

 

2: Something on the surface which interrupts the SAW, causing the waves to deflect rather than running in straight lines.

 

It turns out #2 is quite easy to do. The three points where the ball bearings touch on the bottom and where the component(s) touch on the top are sufficient to disrupt the standing waves. I did a simple test: suspending slab on a wire and hit a metal rod, it rang like crazy for quite some time. Put on the roller blocks, hitting with the metal rod still has some ringing but much less. Put component on top, (even very light weight one), ringing gone, just a barely audible "tick" when hit by the metal rod. Nothing else was needed to stop the ringing.

 

John S.

 

 

Link to comment

@Ralf11  Yeah, the job is quite busy right now!  

 

I’ll apologize ahead of time for these short comments.  Aluminum rings like crazy.  It  has some of the highest stiffness coefficients of any metal, with only titanium and magnesium being higher (then carbides and some other ceramics].  This causes extended ring down, and is called a high mechanical Q material.  It transmits vibration well and “self rings” when exposed to a vibration, as John said.  Ringing less when stacked and weighted is just mass damping.  

 

All stiff objects have 3 vibration modes; bending, torsion and expansion. Then there are SAW waves and some waves that don’t even reach the surface. All others are detectable at the surface.  SAW waves are very high frequency vibrations that, literally, travel only along the surface. These can be interrupted with a few random cuts across the surface about 1/10 the thickness of the plate.  I worked developing LiNbO3 (Lithium Niobate) SAW filters for RF applications and you use a comb shaped electrode at a specific pitch to induce and pickup the SAW wave.  From other direct experience I can tell you the SAW wave on a Silicon Nitride 1” ball is around 3-4 MHz.  Other materials will be slightly lower, and smaller diameters will be higher.  (Fr (proportional to) 1/L)

 

i still haven’t had time to take the through transmission follow up  measurements to the cone and disc spectra that I posted in the other thread.  Some day soon, I hope!  Traveling right now so maybe by the weekend I can provide more info.

Link to comment
10 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

Yes, I've been 'testing' the el cheapo type you also mentioned (ceramic doll saucers) - hence this thread

 

I didn't know you were using Al slabs; or are you?

 

 

Im using thick Alu for other reasons ?

 

The 3/4” birchwood plywood, alu bowl, Silicon Nitride or Carbide 12mm balls followed by a dead marble slab work well for me. My ability to hear differences between slight mods of this is very limited. Perhaps my ears aren’t good enough??‍♂️

 

10 hours ago, Ralf11 said:

 

And what happened to our vibration expert?  (I hate it when people have jobs...)

@Solstice380 nice explanation — I’ve been targeting 1/f ground vibrations — still somewhere in my shop are carbon fiber tubes I was going to fashion into some non-linear vertical springs for vertical isolation.

Custom room treatments for headphone users.

Link to comment

Put a glass of water on the equipment you want to measure.....wait.....carefully put a glass of water on the equipment.  Does it ripple?

Are there surfable waves on the surface.

 

If not, save your money.

In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake ~ Sayre's Law

Link to comment
2 hours ago, NOMBEDES said:

Put a glass of water on the equipment you want to measure.....wait.....carefully put a glass of water on the equipment.  Does it ripple?

Are there surfable waves on the surface.

 

If not, save your money.

 

I know I can’t see 10nm amplitude vibrations!   But when we compare to chip architectures on that scale... hmmmm. 

Link to comment

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now



×
×
  • Create New...