When I started out with my Hi-Fi journey I was a student and every purchase had to be considered carefully to get the most out of the money that I had. Buying an equipment rack was not within my budget, so my turntable had to stand on top of my drawer in my bedroom because that is where I was doing my listening and that is where there were any room in the apartment. This was not the best spot, I could hear vibrations from the floor through my turntable so I had to come up with a solution to that problem.
Looking into what I could use to isolate my turntable a bit to avoid hearing every vibration I was looking at what I had at home and while there were some stuff that might have had some positive effect I did not feel that I had a good solution at my hands. Looking around on the net I saw a tip from someone suggesting that squash balls were good for vibration isolation. That definitely felt within my price range so I went out and bought four of them that I then split down the middle and placed under the feet of my turntable and CD player, I wanted them to be at an even height since they were standing next to each other. While this worked fairly well I did not really like the way it looked, it seemed like the turntable had very high feet.
Fortunately for me I had been given a nice big sheet of 8mm clear acrylic for free that I figured that I could use. I cut out two pieces of acrylic the size of my turntable and CD player, placed the halved squash balls in the corners underneath the acrylic sheets and then placed my components on top. It made a huge difference, it immediately looked so much better and the turntable became much more quiet than using only the squash ball underneath it.
I highly recommend this solution for those who cannot afford to buy one of the more expensive solutions out there, and all vibration damping solutions are quite expensive, so for most people this can be a good way to start. Even though I now have a proper equipment rack for my components I still use my squash balls and acrylic sheets, not least because I really like the way it looks. Acrylic is quite an expensive material though so if you are on a tight budget I would suggest looking into something else to use that is more affordable, but a couple of squash balls should fit into almost any budget.
