I think the LP12 suspension is very widely misunderstood. It should be fairly obvious that it does not provide good isolation from the fact that..it does not provide good isolation! If it did, the thing the deck is sitting on would make no difference and it clearly does. The Linn is just as sensitive to what it sits on as any other turntable. Maybe more so. And Linn devotees can't argue with this as Linn themselves produce baseboards which include suspension. If the springs truly isolated the deck then nothing on the other side of them would matter.
It's possibly better to think of the suspension as being analogous to the springs on a car. Yeah, isolation going on but the other side of it is more effective coupling.
The LP12 suspension can’t make up for a poor floor that moves enough to cause the record to skip. I think the Trampolin was designed to minimize that problem but I found it a compromise performance and setup-wise and the suspension within a suspension was an idea I wasn’t comfortable with. A light rigid table because of its weight doesn’t store up energy and was always recommended as the best surface for the LP12. This was also the case if you had a solid concrete floor, it still improved performance. I believe the suspension isolates well from vibrations in the music range, it has its limits in the subsonic range.
The best place I’ve found for the LP12 is on a basement floor with the speakers in a different room upstairs well isolated from the suspended floor and the amplifier on a wall shelf isolated from the speakers.
Here’s a bit about the Villchur AR turntable, a pioneer in this type of suspension:
In 1961, Villchur designed a turntable (record player), and published an article explaining its several innovations. The tone arm and turntable platen were mounted together and suspended independently from the body of the turntable, so that a shock to the body of the turntable would have little effect on the playing of the record. Indeed, Villchur was fond of demonstrating this independent suspension by hitting the wooden base of the turntable with a mallet while the record played on flawlessly.
The mechanical isolation of the tone-arm-platen assembly from the base had a further advantage. It eliminated the “muddy” bass sound that often resulted when vibrations from the loudspeaker were conducted through the floor and caused feedback through the pickup into the amplifier.
The low mass and damped suspension of the tone arm itself compensated for any irregularities on the surface of the disk so that even warped records could often be played without distortion. When released, the tone arm floated down to the record, so that if it were dropped, it would not crash into the disc (which could harm both the needle and the record). With its quiet motor and precision-ground rubber drive belt, the turntable had extremely low wow and flutter (the lowest of any turntable on the market at that time), and far exceeded the National Association of Broadcasters (National Association of Broadcasters) standards for turntable measurements. The overall look of the turntable was given an award by Industrial Design magazine.
