 The placement of your equipment can have a profound effect on the sound quality. It depends largely on the equipment used, how critical you are and how careful other instructions in this series are carried out. The series Audio Hygiene is called this way since there is a clear parallel with Personal Hygiene. Will you get ill immediately after you forget to wash your hands after a visit to the bathroom? No. Only when you adhere to all the rules of Personal Hygiene the chance of getting a nasty disease will be reduced drastically. Something along these lines goes for Audio Hygiene. With every step you take you will reduce the chance of the sound being influenced negatively. So following the steps in this video can improve the sound quality of your stereo but if it's the only thing you do, there is not much chance it will. Ends are the main topic in this video and I'm not talking about my hands here. All equipment and especially audio equipment is sensitive to vibration. Some audio equipment is more sensitive than others but they all are. Let's start with the turntable. Here microscopic modulations in the groove are scanned by having a very small stylus of which the surroundings are expressed in microns run through that groove. Ideally the cartridge the stylus is mounted in should remain at a constant position above the groove on the ideally flat and resonance free final record. Any vibration in the record, the cancer liver that holds the stylus, the cartridge, the tone arm and the platter will distort the sound. Also the platter axis should fit as tight as possible the bearing while it should be subject to as little friction as possible. The same goes for the bearings of the tone arm while the mechanical construction between the tone arm and the platter bearing should be as firm as possible. Again any mechanical deviation from the non-existing ideal causes distortion. These deviations can be caused by a design that is not sturdy enough but even if it is sturdy it will be impossible to design a turntable that has no resonances. Especially since turntables are used to play music and music is nothing more than variations in air pressure. The energy stored in these variations can easily excite one or more mechanical components of a turntable. Even worse is when the sound energy excites the shelf the turntable is on, since chances are the shelf is not designed to fight resonances. Therefore some turntables like Linn LP-12 have a platter and tone arm base mounted on a suspended sub-chassis. Others fight those resonances by pure mass. A heavy turntable base will absorb a lot of energy. Still it is advisable to place a turntable on a very sturdy surface that is almost free of vibrations. Ideal is a sandbox that has a heavy stone or granite plate in it on which the turntable is placed. But that might cost you your marriage. There is another factor to take in account when placing a turntable. It almost always needs to be 100% horizontal when it uses gravity to set the tracking force and anti-skating. Often the bearings also work better when the turntable is level. Turntables that use springs to set the tracking force and anti-skating are less critical where the tone arm is concerned but there still is the matter of the platter bearing that is designed to be level. The CD player is a combination of mechanics and electronics. It is in fact a kind of turntable only with far smaller grooves and a drastically higher reading speed. In CD players there is a 1.2 mm thick, 10 cm in diameter acrylic disc placed on a platter the size of a 1 euro piece and rotated at 200 to 500 rpm. The laser is mounted on either a swing arm or a linear mechanism that has to check a 500 nanometer narrow part of bits that vary in length between 850 nanometer to 3.5 micrometer at 1.2 to 1.4 meter per second. Now that is 4.3 to 5 km per hour, a sturdy walking pace while reading dots as little in length as 3.5 millionth of a meter. As one of the main designers of the CD once told me, it works by the grace of the imperfection of the system. It might be clear that vibrations on the CD mechanism will cause an increase of reading errors and thus a chance on increased jitter. But also the electronics is subject to performance degradation due to vibrations. In a CD player in particular the crystal oscillator that generates the clock frequency that the DA converter needs to precisely reconstruct the analog signal can be and often is rather sensitive to vibrations. An unstable oscillator generates an unstable clock signal and that is called jitter. Less sensitive but not free of it are all other electronic components, the most sensitive perhaps vacuum tubes. As we saw before electronics are sensitive to vibrations as well. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the voltages the more sensitive the equipment is, so a moving coil pre-pre should certainly be placed on a sturdy surface while power amps might be less sensitive. But again in general, tube equipment is more sensitive to vibration than solid state equipment. And the more refined your system is, the bigger the chance it will lead to sound degradation. Not only because of the equipment but also because the owner or more sophisticated equipment will be more critical. This all led to a market of audio furniture. The good ones really do a good job in keeping vibrations as low as possible while the bad ones have as primary objective to look high end. It also gave us a wealth of accessories like spikes, rubber feet, marble shells and so on. Some do a good job, others don't. The substantial marble plate has a very high mass and therefore will isolate vibrations. Rubber feet will work if they are inert. Just drop one on the floor and if it doesn't bounce at all, it might work. These and cones in my experience will not work. I have discussed this with a scientist of the Technical University of Delft, he was involved in research on vibration and couldn't think of a way spikes and cones would reduce or filter out vibrations. So that coincides with my experience. What will work is a shelf made of two planks with a layer of lead in between or as suggested earlier on, a sand box with a tile marble plate on top of the sand. But I warn you, you better not be married or have your own man cave. Here again there are many stories and advices on how to place your speakers. For the best location see my video on speaker placement. The link is in the show notes. This here is about the feet and stands. Would you use spikes or not? How important are stands for monitor loudspeakers and so on? Let me start with the spikes. As far as I am concerned they only serve one purpose, give the speakers a sturdy placement in a room with carpet on the floor. If you would use normal feet on a carpet the speaker can move slightly due to the construction of the carpet. Using spikes the speakers will rest on the floor beneath the carpet and will not be able to move slightly and thus cause intermodulation distortion. Also there might be a better conductance of vibrations to the floor since there is now contact with the floor. This also means that spikes are of no use when the speakers are placed on concrete, stone or wooden floor. If you use speakers that need a stand there is a lot to gain from a sturdy stand. Even they are made from tubing and tubing like organ pipes have their own resonances. The better ones are damped in some way, a popular way is to fill them with sand but they need to be constructed to hold the sand. An extra benefit is that it makes the stand heavier and thus harder to tip over. If you don't have a carpet where the speakers are to be placed and your speakers or stands are supplied with only spikes you could replace them by lock bolts. They are cheap and far more convenient than putting coins below the spikes. Whatever accessory you use to decouple your equipment and place your speakers on, remember that using only three feet will give a very sturdy placement. In the case of speakers keep in mind that they might tip over easily with only three feet. If you are not sure about resonances in your system, google for Mechanics Stethoscope on Amazon. For under 20 bucks you can get one, simply holding it to the part you expect to resonate and you will hear the resonances, if present. Now there will be people that disagree with the information in this video and that's ok. In audio there will always be circumstances that will not work with general rules. Not because of voodoo but simply since we don't understand everything in audio. That makes audio so much fun to report on. So subscribe to this channel or to my newsletter or follow me on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. See the show notes for the links. If you have a question, post it below this video but please don't ask me for buying advice. See my About Questions video to find out why. If you liked this video, please consider supporting the channel through Patreon and see super exclusive videos too. Just one dollar a month will do. The link is in the show notes. And don't forget to tell your friends on the web about this channel. I am Hans Beekhuyzen, thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com. And whatever you do, enjoy the music.