Black Forest Audio DÄD!MÄT turntable support

Black Forest Audio DÄD!MÄT turntable Mat

Turntable supports are like sand at the seaside made of a wide variety of materials:
Rubber, felt - made of wool or synthetic fibres, graphite, cork, silicone, acrylic, copper, steel, aluminium, leather, sandwich constructions made of a wide variety of materials, etc.

From the beginning, rubber mats were the industry standard, which is usually not questioned. All of the different editions certainly had an audibly positive influence on the test record player for the respective maker. The numerous products make it clear that different turntable constructions made of different materials and material mixtures produced different solutions. If these mats meet other drive concepts, they are often ineffective or even counterproductive.

It would be nice to have a turntable mat that is always positive and mostly excellent in terms of natural, lively sound.

A turntable support for everyone:
The tasks for turntable supports are actually the same for all turntables. Thus, the mats could all be the same if they perform these tasks to a high degree. Then the drive concept plays an ever smaller role.

What is it about?
Interference energy from the drive must not get through to the record in order to interfere with the currently sampled music signal. These are disturbances of the drive, bearings, air and building excitations, but also cavity resonances of classical turntable housings and discolouring material resonances, especially from the plate. At the same time, waste energy from the sampling process should not pass through the record into the drive and from there back to the needle with a time delay in order to delay the timing, reduce transparency and dynamics. The greater the mass of the drive, the greater the delay and thus the effect. A disc mat should therefore not let any interference energy through - ideally it should be "dead" - that's why DÄD!MÄT.

What makes DÄD!MÄT different?
We understand that better when we look at what she doesn't do:

- Unlike all soft materials, it does not try to absorb energy through elastic or plastic deformation.
- Unlike most hard materials, it does not try to achieve a neutral sound image by interference cancellation or counter-colouring.

These methods simply lead to the loss of information, often also to compressed, narrow-banded, smeared, intransparent and undynamic, spatially limited sound. Compliant mats reduce the available dynamics of the record.

That's why DÄD!MÄT is hard. Under the thin skin lies a hard foam layer of fine bubbles. The wafer-thin walls of the bubbles can absorb the energy fed in by deformation and transform it into heat without weakening the stable shape of the DÄD!MÄT and thus the firm support of the record.

Natural timbres, more information, transparency, dynamics, body and space should be the reward. You will certainly find out whether and to what extent this succeeds. Have fun with it!
In the new analogue age this is a continuation of my work from 1985, which led to the development of the Audioplan DampClamp.
Volker Kühn, July 2019