Isolation:

In the 90s, I had a buddy with a system that ran above $50k. He kept the system in a separate room, and punched holes in the wall to run the cables to the speakers in the living room. That was to offer isolation to the rack from the speakers.

The rack that held his system was square tubular steel, and he baked sand in the over to eliminate all moisture, and poured it into the tubing, tapping it down. The rack weighed a ton when it was done. I don’t remember what he did with his turntable, but he probably had those little inverted cones as feet. I remember it had a really heavy base.

He got divorced.

In college, I knew a bunch of guys who put their turntables on a shelf hanging from the ceiling, closely resembling a kid’s playground swing. It was supposed to isolate the turntable from footsteps in the room, but I liked to point out that it’s really exposed to someone walking around upstairs. They didn’t like hearing that.

BTW, the reference to the 1812 Overture was a real one. When I worked for Telarc, we put out an LP of the 1812 using actual cannons. When you looked at the vinyl, you could see where the grooves had to spread apart to capture the wild track of the groove when the cannons blew. MANY, perhaps MOST, turntables couldn’t track it, and audio stores used to love to use that LP, and other Telarc releases, to demonstrate their wares. I used to get calls at work from fans who would actually BRAG that they blew out their giant expensive speakers with that recording. Well, good for you buddy, thanks for being a loyal customer, I guess…