AUDIOPHILE AUDITION focuses on recordings of interest to audiophiles and collectors, with an accent on surround sound for music, and on all hi-res disc formats. Over 100SACD, DVD Video/Audio and standard CD reviews are published during each month, and our archives go back to January 2001.
Mapleshade Finished Platform for Turntables
Air-dried solid maple was found to be the best-sounding support for turntables and other components.
Mapleshade Finished
Platform for Turntables
SRP: $230 (for 18” x 15” x 4”)
Mapleshade
1100 Wicomico St., 5th Fl.
Baltimore, MD 21230
www.mapleshaderecords.com
Intro
I’ve never gotten around to asking Pierre Sprey if he selected the name Mapleshade for his mostly-jazz record label before or after discovering that air-dried solid maple was the very best support platform to put under turntables and other audio electronics. It may be tied in with his project 25 years ago upgrading the famous Maplenoll turntable. After much experimentation, Sprey found that air-dried solid maple - which he obtains from an Amish woodworking shop - provided the best possible turntable isolation compared to all the other possibilities - air suspension, sand boxes, marble, glass, magnetic floatation, hi-tech constrained layer damping, and carbon fiber composites. He found the alternatives all dead-sounding and smeared when compared to solid maple bases.
About half of the enhancement is due to heavy brass footers from Mapleshade, which are available in versions which screw right onto the shafts for the rubber feet that came with your turntable. I have the heavy brass Mapleshade footers which come to a very sharp point. My turntable is a SOTA Star with vacuum holddown. The first enhancement I did was to have SOTA replace their spring-loaded suspension with an elastomer suspension, which I found to be far superior. Then I added the Mapleshade heavy brass footers, which screwed onto the existing threaded shafts under the SOTA table. These then sat on a thick MSB constrained-layer steel isolation plate, which rested on four blue vibration feet on top of an Arcici inflatable turntable support - the whole affixed securely to a low CWD cabinet.
I had two problems with this setup: One was that when pushing down the SOTA record clamp, it bottomed out the Arcici base and sometimes caused changes to the leveling observed on the leveler on the turntable. The other was that moving across the room with anything less than “don’t wake anyone up” foot action, the vibrations would be transmitted to my Transfiguration Spirit pickup cartridge in my SME-V tonearm, if not causing it to actually skip. This always amazed me in spite of the air-bladder support for the turntable and the super-heavy isolation plate.
I had compared several of the new Everest CD reissues with the l996 CD reissues as well as the 1994 DCC vinyl pressings of some of the titles. The vinyl pressings never sounded any better than the CDs and often sounded nearly identical, which surprised me.
Setup
It took some courage to disassemble the entire Arcici/MSB support system and replace it with the simple 18 by 15 by 4 solid maple Mapleshade platform. (They also have two sizes for larger turntables: 24 x 18 x 4 and 24 x 24 x 4; a 2-inch-thick version has been discontinued.) The platform sits on four squarish Isoblock feet, which are another Mapleshade tweak which sells for only $24 a set and consists of layers of ribbed rubber and cork. On top of the 4-inch maple platform go the three pointy feet of the brass footers on my SOTA table. (This particular model has been discontinued but Mapleshade has a couple dozen different brass feet available now - threaded and un-.) It took some effort to get the table leveled at the top. I had to purchase some thinner nuts at the local hardware store in order to have one nut to tighten against the underside of the SOTA table and another on the same shaft to tighten against the special heavy brass feet. (The foil-covered box under the SOTA is my phono preamp, which requires additional shielding to reduce interference from a local rock FM station.)
Listening Tests
After demagnetizing my cartridge, readjusting the VTA and leveling the turntable, I returned to the comparisons of the CDs and LPs. Now the vinyl did sound slightly superior to the CDs, which it had not before. There was more air and a more natural high end that never became steely or annoying in the high end as on some of the CD versions. There was undoubtedly more life in the sonics than I had achieved with the supposedly foolproof Arcici/MBS plate system.
In addition, the two big cons with my previous setup had disappeared entirely! I could press down heard when clamping the record clamp without bottoming out, and I could tango or samba in the middle of my listening room floor without transmitting the slightest noise to the turntable. There is a noise transmission test track on the Analog Productions Test LP, and with the previous Arcici/MSB setup I could get quite a loud thump in the speakers when tapping on any part of the base or table. With the Mapleshade setup, I could only get a slight thump when I tapped vertically really hard on the actual maple base - not from any other point.
Mapleshade - besides turning out many fantastically-realistic and inexpensive jazz CDs - has come up with a variety of tweaks for audio systems. Some of them are a bit beyond the pale to my thinking - such as their cable supports which tend to collapse - but others are amazingly effective. Another great accessory for both vinyl and CDs/DVDs is Mapleshade's Ionoclast Ion Generator - much more powerful than the old Zerostat and less fuss and cost than the Bedini spinner. They also provide excellent lists in their catalogs of free or nearly-free tweaks you can do yourself for your audio system (such as lifting your cables up off the carpet). They have a variety of maple platforms and feet for loudspeakers and electronic components, and have also introduced a new cartridge and tonearm upgrade, as well as a vinyl cleaning system they claim superior to any vacuum cleaning system. Their maple platform concept is surely a winner in my estimation!
written by- John Sunier
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