IKEA Aptitlig: A juicy cheap upgrade.

Reminds me of the IKEA hack using salad bowls to make speaker baffles.

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2013/05/stereo-system-with-4-bland-matt-bowls-and-2-lack-shelves.html

There is a lot of good literature saying that a spherical enclosure is the ideal shape for speaker baffles. However the woodwork involved for such an undertaking would be ridiculous. The wooden IKEA salad bowls are cheap way to get to this end.

 

Do you hear any improvement in sound? What material do you use to couple?
It crossed my mind too building a custom ikea audio rack, if not for the sonic qualities at least to have custom size shelf for huge power amplifier. Fortunately I'm done experimenting with 200w + power amplifier.

Well... do it for the Koolness. Eventually the improvement will come for free or you'll be free of disappointment if it doesn' happen.

 

Yes, it was a nice improvement over the footers driectly on the mdf shelves. Slightly smoother, a bit more texture and depth, and a bit warmer. I use an older Herbie's Isocup and Isoballs for the preamp and Herbies Tenderfeet for the dac.

My 400 w/ch amp sits on a maple cutting board on Herbie's Isocup and Isoballs that is supported to floor with bronze spike cones. You can go nuts with this stuff, but I have tried to use stuff collected over the years and things that are not too expensive. No $2000 polymer amp stand for me.

 

Speaking as a Canadian, there is a startling lack of hockey pucks under all those cutting boads.

 

IME the smaller the device the less lt's gonna need it. I can move my portable dac to any position and it is gonna have the same shitty sound. Full or half size gears are another matter.

Yes, footers directly coupled to the shelf is not ideal. I've heard about herbie's tenderfeet but I've never tried 'em. Have you tried a little piece of bamboo cut from the thinner cutboard I linked above?

 

This is what finally worked for me:

 

Funny, I use some hockey pucks under my speakers to decouple from the stand. Only here I call them herbies Big Dots, I know sound like a shill, huh, well I like his stuff.

yes, we need more half size gears, haha It is hard to get the footers under these full size ones.



Bamboo, no I tried about 3 other types of wood as footer and did not like any of them compared to other materials, but if someone wants to toss me some bamboo chunks so I can say I tried those too, please feel free to pm me.

 

I would like to know the record holders in the IKEA cubby-holes...I need some of those. Surprisingly hard to search for nice black record crates, I know I have not done a good job because they do exist. (When I was last at IKEA, I should have looked up album size before going there. Bad reception inside the building and then I was distracted by considering an electric desk. )

 

They are actually a pretty great fit. Record collectors had a fit when they thought those shelves were going away.

They are 13"x13" squares and about 15" deep. I've looked at a lot of solutions (there are a bunch of interesting ones at http://reddit.com/r/vinyl), but this is the easiest and the cheapest.

There are a couple of other IKEA solutions I considered, but they were about 12.5" by 12.5" squares and I have a bunch of odd-sized record boxes and wanted the tallest possible boxes.

Here are the other two solutions I considered:
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/70268397/
http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40280937/

I also really like these:
http://shop.mapleshadestore.com/Record-Shelf-Systems/departments/327/

 

^Oh, thank you- but I was hoping to find out the handled baskets within the cubby-holes in the Darko pic in the first post...sorry for bad request!

Those are pretty nice, simple options for furniture though!

 

I'm looking at all this stuff and thinking ok, overall you want mass coupling and also vibration damping/isolation/decoupling.

Make your component heavier by coupling it with screwed on spikes into a heavy board, and that'll reduce vibrations. This is purely high school physics, F=ma simplified yadda yadda, the heavier it is, the less overall acceleration/vibration there will be. Damping products like a constrained-layer shearing products (dynamat etc) might do a little bit if the case rattles or something. Add a weight on top, stack another component on there, whatever, reduce the effective surface or cross-section area that rings.

Now if you're thinking there's vibration coming from the floor or whatnot, then you want to isolate/decouple your component from the shelf. There's plenty of special foam pads, but that's crazytalk. Nah, we're still working on cutting boards here. Get a cheap soft board (bamboo? get the natural kind that scratches easily, not the stranded fibreboard) and place that on soft footers (rubber? cork?). Put your other heavy board on top and sandwich some voodoo damping goop in between. That will give the soft board some effective mass to not ring like a gong, but still have the softer absorption properties. All that while floating your fancy schmancy composite base off the shelf with your hockey pucks.

 

Haha, whoops. I quite like my records un-basketed, but I'm lazy.

These are alright, but I don't love that they are fabric. I would want something more rigid.

 

Thank you both! Excellent...I was looking at the Bladis the last time I was at IKEA, they look nice. Not as rigid as milk crates but better than what I am using now.

 

Went and bought one, but can't really hear a difference. But it looks nice though

 

I wouldn't either. And I didn't. I said MY shitty mobile dac, which unfortunately isn't a gov2.

So gears are rotating wheel? I didn't know, Thanks for the correction. As I stated in my presentation it's hard for me writing in another language and corrections are welcome.

Be sure to couple the case directly to the bamboo with smaller pieces of bamboo.