Does it make sense to put isolation devices under speakers?

My experiences are that any speaker needs to be coupled very tightly to the most weight that you can organise, which is typically the room structure: there were a couple of threads some months back thrashing out aspects of this. Typically I couple the speaker to the floor or a very, very heavy base with Blu-Tack.

For me the loss of quality occasioned by not doing this is too dramatic for me to consider it worthwhile listening to the system ...

Frank

Hi Caesar,

I have heard from Mike Lavigne that his Evolution Acoustics MM3s sounded much better with new isolation feet underneath. I have heard good things about Wave Kinetics (Jonathan Tinn of NVS and Playback Designs fame). They make expensive isolation footers for large speakers. Finally, just read an article by Robert Harley on the Stillpoints Ultras or something...on their AVGuide website...some relatively new isolation footers for speakers. He used them on his new Focal Stella EMs...said dramatically improved black backgrounds, sounds like greater focus of the musical signal, more 'snap to' and less haze in the presentation.

Let us know if you try. I have always wanted to, but with speakers that weigh over 600 lbs each, i am not really in the mood to try...though admit to being very intrigued.

+1. Gary has done an excellent job of discussing the problems and how everything must work together to minimize cabinet movement.

a different way to look at this question is that speakers have progressively better performance when you go from them just sitting on the floor flat, to spikes, and then to de-coupling.

most people might start off with speakers on carpet, then spike them. it's very easy to hear this improvement. another part of spikeing a speaker would be mass loading a relatively light weight speaker. say a small 2 way on stands. place a brick or some other heavy weight on top and you will get better focus and tighter bass. this is the same 'grounding' principle of spiking. you are in essense making the cabinet more solid, and taking some of the slop out of the cabinet. when the speaker cone moves, the grounding reduces the tendancy for the cabinet to deflect. this makes the driver more linear and tightens up the transients since the delecting cabinet causes 'overshoot' to stopping and 'delay' starting the driver.

then when you go from 'grounding' the speaker thru spiking, to de-coupling the speaker with some sort of de-coupling footer, you again gain image focus and bass definition because now you have reduced feedback down into the floor to your gear. and environmental feedback from the floor to your speaker. your floor is singing along with the music and adds it's own noise to the music. de-coupling will allow the speaker to sing by itself.

there are cases where grounding is a better 'net' gain than de-coupling, but typically not with high performance speakers where the higher quality cabinet is keeping the driver linear for the most part. the other variable is how solid your floor is. sometimes the best net gain is to brace your floor in some way. or even to mass load the floor area around the speaker.

until you actually hear what high quality decoupling footers can do you will never appreciate that approach.

a friend brought over the set of decouplers for me to try a few years ago, and i refused to allow him to take them with him. i bought a set for him and had them shipped to him. and this was with my 575 pound speakers. they each have 2 15" active subs in sealed cabinets with 1000 watt amps built in. that's alot of energy to control. logic might tell you that spiking them into the concrete floor would be better. but logic was dead wrong.

I was most impressed with an arrangement that Bob Ludwig has at Gateway Studios. The monitors are directly mounted to bedrock through openings in the floor. Thus, the speakers, themselves, are rigidly coupled to a huge mass while, at the same time, they are completely uncoupled from the room structure. Nice for his downstairs studios but I have not figured out how to adapt that to my 11th floor apartment.

Kal

Kal Rubinson said:

I was most impressed with an arrangement that Bob Ludwig has at Gateway Studios. The monitors are directly mounted to bedrock through openings in the floor. Thus, the speakers, themselves, are rigidly coupled to a huge mass while, at the same time, they are completely uncoupled from the room structure. Nice for his downstairs studios but I have not figured out how to adapt that to my 11th floor apartment.

Kal

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i would wager that high quality decoupling of those speakers in Mr. Ludwig's studio would outperform the grounding to the bedrock. assuming, of course, that the decouplers sat on the bedrock.

the bedrock has it's own noise floor too. certainly less than the Studio building but it's there none-the-less.

another way to look at this would be how would an electron microscope be spec'd ideally to be installed in that spot. no way would it sit on the bedrock; you could never get the visual resolution you needed. you would need some sort of isolation. this isolation device would work best with the most solid footing, but it would be essential for optimal performance.

http://www.herzan.com/resources/tutorials.html

the 575 pound speakers in my room sit on 6" of concrete over 'Glacier Till'; which is the rock and dirt compressed from a receeding glacier. i'm on the side of a mountain far away from any main road or highway. so almost zero environmental energy. pretty solid stuff. yet the decoupling footers made a huge positive difference.

Not sure about the Wave Kinetics footers Mike but when I experimented several years ago with decouplers I found it most difficult to maintain the speakers in a true upright position based on the way in which the decouplers are made

This thread has me interested. My listening room has a poured concrete floor with a high grade pad and carpet on top of it. I previously posted pics of the new replacement spike system I bought for my speakers. These were actually steel plates that bolted to the bottom of my speakers that have the spikes mounted to them with knobs to turn for leveling. This made a big difference in how well grounded my speakers are as well as how sturdy and level they are. If there is a further improvement that doesn’t screw up the leveling of the speaker, I want to hear it.

Steve Williams said:

Not sure about the Wave Kinetics footers Mike but when I experimented several years ago with decouplers I found it most difficult to maintain the speakers in a true upright position based on the way in which the decouplers are made

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Jonathan developed his Wave Kinetics speaker footers as a reaction to my (and one other MM3 owner's) raves about the Harmonix footers i have. Jonathan and i tried a few different prototypes on my speakers before he came up with one that was stable for a 575 pound speaker. i never did try the final version but the first couple were not solid and safe. so i get what you are saying. but my Harmonix footers are so stable i can actually push the MM3's (575 pounds, 73 inches tall) around on those footers. they are totally solid and my understanding is that the Wave Kinetics footers are just as solid.

this is what i use. the speaker spikes go into the recess on the top of the spike bases. then you level the speaker by adjusting the spikes. once level they are very very solid and in 4+ years they have stayed very solid.

and not cheap. but the performance gain is well worth it.

Mike Lavigne said:

this is what i use. the spikes go into the recess on the top of the spike bases. they are very very solid.

and not cheap. but the performance gain is well worth it.

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Mike

how do these decouple? I can't tell from the picture?

Steve Williams said:

Mike

how do these decouple? I can't tell from the picture?

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i don't exactly know.

but it's likely to do with impedence changes. different types of materials transfer energy or absorb energy in different ways. so essentially noise enters each end and is absorbed or converted to heat or some such thing.

are they true decouplers then?

Spiking my Maggies to a concrete floor improved their sound a hair and the step response looked a bit better (on a 'scope). I recall B&W presenting a nice demo at one time on the benefits of making their speakers as stable as possible. Of course, now my old Maggies are just sitting on the carpet of the basement and still sound pretty good to me... Somehow, over the years, I seem to have shifted from listening to the system, to listening to the music. I would say I've grown up, but my wife disagrees.

The plus of tight coupling is that fine detail is better resolved; the downside of that is if the system has low level distortion problems these will be highlighted. In that case a bit of "sloppiness" will help to niceify the sound. Ultimately the trick is for all the excess energy being absorbed by the structure holding the drivers in place to be either transferred to a huge mass, or dissipated into heat more locally, or a combination. Otherwise, the structure is going to bounce around or vibrate in some manner, and colour the sound, subjectively perhaps advantageously.

Frank

I recently experimented with both coupling and decoupling (250# speakers), and ended up preferring cones into a solid floor. OTOH, with some lighter speakers (130#) on a suspended floor, decoupling was clearly better.

Mike Lavigne said:

i would wager that high quality decoupling of those speakers in Mr. Ludwig's studio would outperform the grounding to the bedrock. assuming, of course, that the decouplers sat on the bedrock.

the bedrock has it's own noise floor too. certainly less than the Studio building but it's there none-the-less.

another way to look at this would be how would an electron microscope be spec'd ideally to be installed in that spot. no way would it sit on the bedrock; you could never get the visual resolution you needed. you would need some sort of isolation. this isolation device would work best with the most solid footing, but it would be essential for optimal performance.

http://www.herzan.com/resources/tutorials.html

the 575 pound speakers in my room sit on 6" of concrete over 'Glacier Till'; which is the rock and dirt compressed from a receeding glacier. i'm on the side of a mountain far away from any main road or highway. so almost zero environmental energy. pretty solid stuff. yet the decoupling footers made a huge positive difference.

Click to expand...

No doubt especially since the bedrock mounting would be an LP filter making the decoupling more efficient.

Hi caesar,

caesar said:

I have had great experiences isolating all electronics with Still points - amps, preamps, digital sources, etc.

But does it make sense to use isolation devices under speakers?

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It makes a great deal of sense to me.
Though I'd always heard speakers should be mounted as rigidly as possible, I've come to think this is in reference to the *driver/baffle* interface and not to the speaker/room interface. The reason I've come to think this way is what I've heard from two *very* effective means of isolating speakers.

Several years ago, after experimenting with all sorts of footers, I came to find that *anything* one places under a component (or on top of a component), will *change* its sound. Whether one *likes* the change is a personal call. What I also found was the changes tend to be somewhat random and more often than not, to my ears, represented mere changes and not necessarily improvements.

The exceptions all seemed to have in common that they are mechanical low-pass filters: air bearings and roller bearings. In both cases, I found design as well as implementation can alter the final results but when both are properly done, I found consistent and repeatable *improvements* with any component I tried them on. (Even DVD players showed less grain, deeper blacks, better contrast when properly isolated.)

One of the roller bearing designs in particular, impressed me greatly. But I thought the concept could be taken further, so I created my own roller bearing design (which I call Hip Joints) and had a local machinist make me a few prototype sets. I was so pleased with the results - which were confirmed by a number of acquaintances who compared Hip Joints with my commercial favorites - that I had the machinist make me enough sets to accommodate everything in my system.

As I added the Hip Joints to component after component, I found some presented greater degrees of improvement than others but still, the effects were cumulative and as I isolated more components, the sound of the system improved to degrees I would not have expected - or believed had I not experienced it for myself and continually compared with and without the roller bearings. When I added air bearings, the system took another leap upward in freedom from sounding like a system - it just left the music and (if the recording contained it) the space in which the music was being played.

As a lark, one day I decided to try a set of Hip Joints under my Maggies. I was not prepared to find that speakers presented even greater degrees of improvement than even digital gear does. I put up a long post on another forum on which I used to participate and referred to the non-isolated speakers as "bound and gagged" by comparison. Every sonic parameter I know how to describe took a nice big step upward.

I remember listening to a nicely recorded James Taylor album and marveling at the smoothness of his voice and the crystalline brilliance of his Martin acoustic. When I took the speakers off the roller bearings and played the same recording, it was as if James developed a sore throat and was using rusty strings on his guitar. I wasn't prepared for this and certainly wasn't expecting it. I put the rollers back under the speakers and the clarity of James' voice and guitar returned. The differences were immediate and obvious as well as consistent and repeatable.

A few years later, the local audio society was demoing a wide variety of speakers on a commercial product: Townshend's Seismic Speaker Stands. They did exactly the same thing. No matter what speaker was A/B'd on and off the stands, the differences were immediate and obvious, consistent and clearly repeatable.

My best suggestion is to experiment and see what *you* hear with properly designed and implemented isolation under your speakers.
I hope you find results as joyful as I did (and do).

By the way, both of my subs are also "afloat" on Hip Joints now.

Best regards,
Barry
www.soundkeeperrecordings.com
www.barrydiamentaudio.com