Townshend Seismic Vibration Isolation Stand

The Townshend Audio Seismic Isolation Stand is an equipment support system designed to fully isolate all hi-fi, audio and video components from ground borne vibration.

Overview:

• Versatile design with adjustable shelf height
• Enhances clarity across the frequency range
• Delivers wider and deeper soundstages
• Improves bass definition
• Reduced muddiness and time smear
• Makes transients clearer

In More Depth:

The concept for the Stand is derived from the original multi award winning Seismic Sink Stand introduced in 1997. This radical product re-wrote the rules on equipment support, rules which had always insisted on rigid coupling to the floor to ‘drain away unwanted energy’.

The performance of the soft suspended Seismic Vibration Isolation Stand compared with all rigid designs showed the hi-fi world how absolutely vital it is to thoroughly isolate all source and amplifier components from ground-borne vibration.

The Seismic Sink Stand sets a new level of performance, style and practicality. Minimalist in design it has height adjustable smoked glass shelves held on support poles and mounted on a platform that includes eight Seismic Load Cells™ in-between two rigid steel plates. This arrangement, in conjunction with the mass of the stand and equipment, forms a stable suspended low-pass filter with an attenuation of about 20dB per decade above 2Hz. This ensures that deleterious ground borne vibrations from 4Hz and above are virtually eliminated.

Isolating audio and video components from vibration increases fidelity and imparts an openness and clarity to the sound, with gains in focus and solidity of image.
A result that non-suspended stands simply cannot approach. 100% maintenance-free, the stand is manufactured to a high standard in order to last a lifetime.

Standard shelves are made of polished and toughened safety glass that looks great and provide durability. The four point mounting clamps have vibration absorbing pads which form a constrained layer damped assembly with virtually no resonance once the equipment is in place.

Rubber or felt feet on the supported equipment completely eliminate any possibility of ringing. The stand rests on soft plastic feet that will not harm wood or carpet floors and are easily adjustable for precise leveling.

The Seismic Isolation Stands are manufactured in the standard following sizes:

• Size 1 equipment width up to 45cm (18”)
• Size 2 equipment width up to 50cm (19.5”)
• Size 3 equipment width up to 53cm (20.75”)
• Wide equipment width up to 100cm (39”)

The Seismic Isolation stand can be levelled with the supplied spanner when fully loaded. The Load Cells™ come in a range of strengths to suit the weight of the equipment suspended. In the standard range the maximum equipment weight is between 150kg and 200kg (330 & 440lb) depending upon the number of shelves.

The final product is custom built to suit your needs, to make this possible we need to know the following:

• Weight for each piece of equipment starting from the bottom shelf.
• Width, depth and height for each piece of equipment starting from the bottom shelf.

The length of the support poles is relative to the number of the shelves and the height of the gaps between them.

The Importance of Vibration Isolation

Mechanical vibration degrades the sound of all high fidelity systems.

Vibrations affect the reproduction of sound through hi-fi systems. Although many of these are small and may go largely unnoticed, vibrations have a negative impact on the quality of sound in virtually all hi-fi components.

• Turntables are highly sensitive to vibration, which raises the noise floor, degrading the sound not to mention stylus jump due to footfall.

• With silver-disc players vibration affects the laser mechanism and the crystal oscillators introducing severe sound-degrading jitter.

• With tube or valve amplifiers vibration rattles the microphonic electrodes, especially the grids.

• Transistor amplifiers have microphonic components, including capacitors and connecting wires which move relative to one and another generating rogue voltages. All of these mechanisms will degrade the delicate audio signal.

• Computers, streamers and DACs are highly susceptible to mechanical noise as they all contain vibration sensitive crystal oscillators.

• Rigidly spike or cone mounted speakers transmit energy into the floor radiating vibration throughout the room and ultimately, through your rack and into your equipment. This seriously degrades performance as described above. Spike and cone mounted speakers cause the whole room structure to vibrate, often resulting in an unrealistic boomy bass whilst masking subtle detail. Further, this unwanted structural vibration can seriously irritate your neighbours.

Complete vibration isolation transforms sound quality.

The secret is to fully float your whole Hi Fi System independently from the speakers and the floor. Townshend have devised a complete solution that to allow this to be done in an optimum way.

The key component is the Townshend Seismic Load Cell™.

The Seismic Load Cell™ consists of a high quality alloy steel compression spring surrounded by a flexible synthetic rubber jacket with two end plates.

Screw threads in each plate facilitate height adjustment and provide attachment points. A movement-sensitive, air-resistance damper rapidly dissipates low frequency oscillation caused by disturbing the suspended equipment.

Seismic Load Cells™ are very ‘soft’ and allow free movement in all three dimensions; up/down, left/right and back/forth.
This unique solution blocks all deleterious vibration from 3Hz upwards and from all directions.

As the frequency increases, the isolation gets progressively greater, ensuring that virtually no vibration can pass from and to the suspended equipment.

As each hi-fi component is isolated, the sound progressively improves.