The business of isolating audio gear from external vibrations is increasingly called upon to do more than offer protection just from casual knocks or the effects of insecure floorboards. HGVs or railway trains in the vicinity can generate infrasonic disturbances powerful enough to shake whole buildings, and we are now coming to realize that such things are necessarily part of hi-fi demonology. My thoughts were turned to this recently when reconstruction work on the rail line near my house suddenly removed the shaking which had been felt routinely in the top floor bedroom when heavy goods trains go through late at night. I then made a journey on that same line which involved passing various groups of Pylon-supported high-voltage power cables. As usual in the UK, the latter were fitted with small devices whose function is to subdue the transverse oscillations induced by wind. Left undamped, such vibrations can produce metal fatigue at stationary terminating points, and thousands of such junctures flitted past as my train sped along.
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