IsoAcoustics Gaia Footers AND Townshend Seismic Podiums

@blisshifi 

Whilst I take the point about weight distribution and stability, as your speakers are a normal rectangular shape and bearing in mind that you have a speaker sitting on 4 springs, whether it be podiums or bars, any the impact can only be very minimal when using the bars.

You also stated that using the spikes onto the podiums wasn't all positive and that your speakers are bottom ported, so would the bars not be worth a try as the gain from not using spikes and allowing the port to work properly might bring you more gains than the potential losses from not using the podiums. Also as you know the pods can be adjusted in height so you can raise or lower the speakers as a way of fine tuning the port.

Just to update the thread, I spent a good amount of time dialing things in last night. Only ver little needed to be done with positioning to get the best sound I’ve gotten out of my speakers with the Townshend Podiums.

They are still on their stock spikes vs directly on the platform. Where I reported the tonal balance shifting in the past, this was largely caused by the speakers being placed slightly closer together, causing an increase of energy in the center. The bass did get more taut which at first made it sound leaner, but this is likely due to less energy going into the floor. By adjusting the positioning, the speakers have reached a higher level of clarity. Microdetails are more discernable with less fatigue. With less resonance, the sonics have significantly better bass speed and articulation compared to IsoAcoustics Gaia footers. This leads to an overall more holographic presentation and improved air. 

I still highly recommend the IsoAcoustics footers as a more cost-effective solution. I’d say they get about 70% of where the Podiums take you at less than half the price. And I still very much leverage Isoacoustics Orea footers under every component that I own. 

The theory of more stuff.

Vibration isolation in audio is a subject surrounded in mystery half truths and any number of wild theories. As an engineering exercise, the explanation is quite straight foreword and may be explained by the “Theory of more stuff”.
 

Take a surface, be it the floor or a table, on which your hi fi component is placed and it is desired to reduce the vibration from the support to the equipment. The way this is done is to put “some stuff” between the equipment and the supporting surface. There are three possible outcomes.
 

1 The vibration in the equipment is more than the vibration in the support.
This is not possible as if it were; the energy crisis would be solved! More
out than what is put in. Free power forever! Unfortunately, this scenario
contradicts the first and second laws of thermodynamics, so is not
possible.
 

2 The vibration in the supported equipment will be the same as in the case of no stuff. The chances of this are one in a million because something has been changed… it may be the same, but that is extremely unlikely, therefore, the only possibility is,
 

3 The vibration will be attenuated, to a greater or lesser degree, and this is the case.
 

There are many products out there that do in fact attenuate vibration. Be it spikes on glass, wood and slate, aluminium spikes in cups, ball bearings in cups, solid plates separated by compliant sheets, lead, Bluetack, sand, marble, concrete, the list is endless. It is also known that multiple combinations of the above produce better results because there is more stuff. E.g. multiple platforms stacked really high.
 

The engineering approach is to get the best result in the simplest manner by optimizing the “stuff” and way back about two centuries ago the Victorian engineers came up with the solution…. the spring! The spring may be anything “springy”, from elastic, rubber, coiled steel, straight steel, air-bladders to flexible wooden strips. As long as it has sufficient spring or compliance, when optimised with an appropriate mass, a mechanical low pass filter is realised.

The ideal is to have the resonant frequency as low as is possible, ideally around 2Hz in both the horizontal and vertical planes and with a damping ratio of about 0.16. This will give an attenuation of about 25dB at 10 Hz increasing at 20dB per decade above. This will ensure excellent isolation for the deleterious audio system vibrations which are from 5Hz to 500Hz.