Quite right, measurement alone does nothing. The key is to try something, see if it works and then find out why it does or doesn't. Some times it will be obvious but often it won't and that is where measurement comes in. Our world is so fixated on profit that everything gets measured and tested to be sure it will work before it is ever tried but the pioneers did it the other way around. I suspect Celestion did their measurements and then concluded that a characteristic was undesirable based on a theory. Better to take something that sounds good and something that doesn't and then see what is different.guydarryl wrote: ↑Mon Nov 02, 2020 11:54 pmNot convinced that measuring, in itself, would help very much.Geoff.R.G wrote: ↑Tue Oct 13, 2020 2:48 pmI have only one thing to say to that "Laser interferometry".Vinyl-ant wrote: ↑Tue Oct 13, 2020 12:04 pm Ive found that silicone damping via a damping trough and paddle helps alot with controlling resonances in arm/cartridge systems. If a cart is isolated from the arm it shouldnt excite resonances in the arm itsself, but, its own structural resonances will affect its output as there is nowhere for them to go. Peronally i think this is what i heard with the cartridge man isolator. Normally, the cartridge resonances would be dumped into the arm and shunted away, the problem resonances that match and excite the arm are the ones to look at.
Silicone damping will damp higher frequency oscillations more than lower frequency i would have thought, and the viscosity of the silicone fluid will have a bearing on the frequency range it will damp
Ive tried this out with various arm designs ive penned and built over the years, and have come to the conclusion that there is no one size fits all solution. There are simply too many variables.
I keep looking at how to measure the resonant behaviour of arms as it interests me, getting hold of an accelerometer small enough not to influence its own measurements has been a stumbling block
I took a bunch of pupils to Celestion speakers at Foxhall road in Ipswich (must have been about 25 years ago) and it was fascinating to watch them using laser interferometry to study and develop loudspeaker cones - I think that they may have been the first company to use this technique in this way.
I didn't like their speakers very much though it must be a matter of knowing what to do once you have the observations/measurements.
In the case of Houdini, I am sure it does something but I won't spend £300, or even £100, to find out what. However, it would be useful to know why it does what it does but, as with so much in the world of sound production/reproduction, we don't have agreement on what sounds good and what doesn't.