Spin Doctor

One of the most common turntable-related problems I get asked to solve is footfalls. People with squishy floors must tiptoe gingerly back to the listening seat lest they send the stylus skipping across the record—no fun! Good music should make you want to get up and dance; that's not exactly in the cards if doing so sends the needle flying.

This topic reminds me of a school ski trip I took to Austria in the mid-1970s. I was a teenager, and the jukebox in the dorm we stayed in turned out to be unskippable. That machine, from AMI Rowe, was low and wide and sat on casters. We challenged each other to make it skip by rolling it out into the room and then quickly ramming it back against the wall, all while some Euro-disco hit like "Yes Sir, I Can Boogie" by Baccara or "Daddy Cool" by Boney M was playing. The machine shrugged off all this teenage abuse and continued playing unscathed as we watched through its glass top to see the record-player mechanism swinging back and forth on the giant springs that isolated it from the outside world.

Giant springs and a 35gm tracking force is not a very audiophile-friendly footfall solution. For a modern-day fix, we first need to consider why turntables skip.

In recent years, I've begun to understand how different building construction methods affect turntable users. Here in North America, we seem to suffer from more footfall problems than audiophiles in other countries. It comes down to how we build our houses and who designs our turntables. A handful of fine companies make turntables in the US, but, though it pains me to say it, most new turntables I encounter come from Europe or Asia. In Asia and Europe, most homes—those likely to host turntables anyway—are made from bricks or concrete or are just more sturdily built. European turntable designers develop their products in an environment where the floors don't move as much; they don't encounter footfall issues like the ones we have here. They don't generally think of footfalls as a problem that needs to be solved.

The problem affects two opposite types of turntable designs. First are solid turntables with little or no isolation from the underlying supporting surface—three or four rubber feet at best. Then there are 'tables that are softly sprung, with suspensions made to absorb small-amplitude, vertical vibrations in a certain range of frequencies, which go haywire when they encounter vibrations too large, too low (in frequency), or too lateral.

With the first group, any jolt to a spongy floor caused by walking or dancing will travel straight up the rack into the turntable, often with enough force to knock the needle out of the groove. I encountered this recently with a guy whose record would skip every time an elevated New York subway train went past a few hundred feet from his window.

With nonsuspended turntables, the problem can usually be solved rather simply, by introducing a compliant layer between the turntable and the cabinet or stand supporting it. Feel free to get fancy and tweaky, with expensive audiophile footers and platforms, but a simple Sorbothane disc under each footer will be sufficient to prove the concept. The material you use must be appropriately thick and compliant relative to the turntable weight, so experiment. With nonsuspended 'tables, it's usually sufficient to keep those big jolts at bay, allowing skip-free playback.

I tend to associate softly sprung turntables with the British, due to the popularity of such suspended 'tables as the Linn Sondek LP12, Systemdek (both Scottish), and Michell Gyrodec (English), but bouncy turntable suspensions go back farther, to American 'tables like the AR-XA and the H.H. Scott 710-A. The suspensions on such 'tables are intended to reduce or eliminate vibrations—as long as the frequency isn't too low, the amplitude isn't too large—and the motion is strictly vertical. Footfalls tend to cause problems for such 'tables mostly on loose, bouncy wood floors, where the frequency is very low and the floor's displacement can be large.

Linns are notoriously difficult to use on bouncy wood floors, and in difficult cases the typical recommendation is to install a wall-mounted shelf. That's a great solution, and plenty of suitable wall shelves exist, like the Pangea Premier SE MkII and the Target Audio WV. Both have wall-fixing bolts spaced 16" apart, so you can screw them into the studs on a standard stud wall.

If a wall shelf isn't an option in your space, there are ways to make a turntable on a bouncy floor more stable, but first we need to consider how a suspended wood floor moves. Underneath the finished floor is a layer called the subfloor, which is plywood or a manufactured wood product and is in turn is supported by a row of spaced wood planks, called joists. Joists, in turn, are supported by a wood sill that runs around the perimeter of the room, where the floor meets the wall. Typically, a wood floor is most solid at the sill. Usually—but not always—it is also solid over joists. The farther you go from a joist—and especially from the sill—the more the structure flexes. The worst problems occur when the builder messes up, as when two pieces form a seam that's not over a joist, so the subfloor is unsupported at the edges. Spots like that can be especially squishy.

Sometimes people tell me they don't anticipate a problem because the turntable will be placed on a heavy piece of furniture. The assumption is that this will force the floor down against the subfloor and joists, causing the floor to flex less. For whatever reason, in practice, I usually find that this only exacerbates the problem.

So, what to do? The first piece of advice is obvious. Try to find a less-spongy spot to place your turntable rack. If that works, you're done.

If you have access to the floor from below—as when your listening space is above an unfinished basement—you have some other options. The easiest is to hammer shims between the joists and the subfloor. If the sponginess is due to the subfloor being poorly connected with the joists, this could solve your problem.

A more dramatic fix is to use a jack to prop up the floor joists (or the subflooring directly, whichever is the problem) from below. This solution can be extremely effective if you can do it. You can even rent a jack and use it to install a new post directly under the spongy area.

But what if you don't have access from below? Most likely, you have placed your turntable stand with its rear legs near the wall, where the floor is supported by the sill. The front legs will extend a couple of feet out into the room, where the floor may be springier. As we walk around the room, the bouncing floor causes the front legs of the rack to move up and down, while the rear legs remain still. This causes the top shelf of the stand to move not just vertically but also laterally. Even with its suspension tuned to perfection, a Linn LP12 doesn't deal well with horizontal movement.

The solution is to brace the top of the turntable stand against the wall behind it using some kind of stiff wedge. This will inhibit the rack from moving laterally. I have made temporary fixes using everything from a stack of CD cases to a couple of hard-cover books, jammed between the top rear of the stand and the wall, in a way that puts pressure on the rack. If this works, you can make a fancier rig using parts procured from the hardware store. Perhaps some audio accessory manufacturer will read this and come up with an audiophile-approved version you can buy for big bucks. If that's you, please remember where you got the idea.