Feets Don’t Fail Me Now


I write this post at the end of a long journey. A journey driven by my tweakophile heart through a minefield of pseudoscience towards a counterintuitive conclusion.

I have, at last, found the right footers for my speakers. (At least for the next couple of weeks.)

I am here to tell of my journey but not to give advice. I have no knowledge to impart to anyone else. My journey that has touched on the far corners of the audiophile map but found peace in a very simple solution.

Spoiler: My speakers are resting comfortably on carpet sliders. Specifically, one-inch GorillaGlides from Amazon.

They work for me in my system and my room but I have no idea about other circumstances. I have LS50s that are poster-puttied to KEF metal stands that rest on a suspended wooden floor. That floor is in a Brooklyn brownstone from the late 1800s that was gut renovated about 15 years ago.

Of course, there was nothing wrong with the sound before I started this journey. That’s where my love of tweaks comes into play. Couldn’t I do better. In answer to that question, there are not many parts of an audio system that can has so many Solutions, so many different parts and so many possible set-ups, most of which don’t break the bank.

And I’ve been through them all. Spikes, various iso-pucks, about half of the Herbie’s catalog, and self-selected sorbothane bits and pieces. I don’t know why it took me so long to reach the oft-recommended carpet sliders, given that they’re probably the cheapest and easiest solution out there but, unfortunately, I’m not known for doing the cheap and easy thing.

Some observations from the journey:

—Spikes suck the bass out of the music like Donald Trump sucks the civility out of civilized discourse. It’s not that they produce “audiophile bass,” they just produce less bass.

—Few debates are as long and unproductive as coupling v. decoupling. Cables are the once and future king when it comes to misplaced debates, I guess, but (de)coupling must rank high. Which does what? Who knows? Who cares?

—Carpet glides have very little give, which serves to reinforce a conclusion I’ve reached several times before in several different ways: Damping is bad. I’ve tried damping in various places for various reasons but the consequences have been negative every time.

My belief, wholly unsupported by scientific fact, is that while damping—from iso-pucks and Herbie products, for example—may work to prevent vibrations from traveling from the room back up the stand to the speaker, they also degrade the stability of the platform from which sound is launched. In my experience, anything that is producing a signal that we will eventually hear as music—source, amp, or speaker—works better when it sits on something solid. “Solid” as in fixed and unmoving.

It makes sense that those components work better with less vibration but it makes more sense that producing and launching the signal is the primary concern. Anything mushy make the launching surface less solid. It sucks up signal that we should be hearing as music.

—If solidity is the goal, shouldn’t spikes work best of all? Makes sense. But that’s not the way it is under my speakers. It will take a wiser man than I to divine the reason.

paul6002

Showing 2 responses by hilde45

I copy and paste some great quotes from brownsfan made recently on this forum. 

@brownsfan noted three types of issues -- without mentioning the seismic one:

movement of the speaker cabinet back and forth and side to side due to Newtonian action reaction caused by the driver motion
cabinet vibration also due to the drivers motion
floor resonance being transferred back and forth between the speaker and flooring until it finally dissipates.

 I did not include vibrations transmitted to the speakers that have its origins outside the confines of the listening room as a 4th type of kinetic motion because the medium through which those vibrations are transmitted is the room flooring.  So my type 3 above is inclusive of anything that is transmitted to the speaker via the flooring.

In addition, I don't think anyone has said that such vibrations are not audible.  But I did say that they are probably orders of magnitude less significant on concrete than they are on typical wood subflooring over a crawl space or in a second floor application.  In my estimation and in my experience, the worst offender is usually type 2 if one is on wood flooring.  If not, then it would appear that type 3 vibration is the more significant.

The problem here is that we can't determine with any degree of certainty which of the 3 types is most significant in our particular setting.  Another problem is that addressing one type of kinetic energy may exacerbate the other two.  This is why I don't hear many people claiming spikes are the answer.  

The answer here is finding a way to rapidly (instantaneously would be ideal) convert these three (or 4 if you insist) types of kinetic energy to heat.  The idea of isolation only works if you are isolating from an external source (seismic, as example).  If you are talking about type 1 energy, you might address the movement of the speaker using spikes.  But the law of conservation of mass and energy tells us that the energy that wanted to move the speaker and now can't, must express that energy in some other form.  So spikes are converting the type 1 energy to a combination of type 2 energy plus heat.  Thus, if type 2 energy is worse in terms of audible effects than type 1 energy, spikes could make your speakers sound worse. And spikes can't do anything at all to address type 2 and type 3 vibration. 

This same argument can be applied to products designed to address type 3 or type 2 energy.  Unless a particular device is capable of converting all three types of energy to heat, and doing so rapidly and efficiency, the device is robbing Peter to pay Paul.  

I really think the manufactures that are super engineering their speaker cabinets have recognize what I am saying above.  That is what these super rigid cabinets are doing.  They are efficiently and rapidly converting type 2 kinetic energy to heat.

For those us that don't want to pay more for our speakers than we did for our house, we are forced to look for products like the Townsend for a poor man's solution, and the reality is that we are going to have to try some different types to see (hear) what works best in our particular setting. 

@paul6001 

Browns Fan may know more about physics than anyone since A. Einstein. But in my experience, it’s not likely. Besides, I’m not interested in such hypotheses. I’m going to trust my ears, and my ears tell me that carpet slides are the answer.

Go ahead and trust your ears. Brownsfan trusts his and I trust mine. But we don't exclude using knowledge to help us get closer rather than just guessing. We don't celebrate ignorance. But you do you.