Isoacoustics Orea vs Townshend Seismic Pod on Components

Pitch in music is relative frequency. Perfect pitch is when you can tune for 440 A (for example) without the tuning fork. If you are trying to tell me your perfect pitch is so perfect you know it is 28.5Hz, good one. Mine go down to 18.372 Hz but are down 3.8dB, unless I move my head 3" to the left and then absolutely flat. Try Bela Fleck Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, see what I mean. 

It might be an Android. I don't know. 

Note mechanical is only one part of the energy going into walls, there is also acoustic energy. Main point I'm trying to get across is measured modes are not always entirely due to the shape of the room and speaker locations. Those are a big part of it but the room itself has resonant frequencies determined largely by the composition and structure of the room itself. 

Walls in other words, made of 2x4 and sheetrock, absorb energy and resonate, releasing energy back into the room. Another reason why a DBA is so much better than the old school one sub with EQ and tube traps. 

I have to wonder though, 28.5Hz? Never in my life heard anyone say Wow your system sounds great! All except for that dip at 28.5 Hz. Either you have perfect pitch, or....

Modes are calculated based on wave lengths and room dimensions. This is a gross simplification. In reality a great deal of energy gets into the walls, floor, and ceiling causing these structural elements to vibrate and produce sound of their own. Some of this due to acoustic energy, sound pressure waves cause the walls to move, store and release energy. A lot is also directly transmitted into them by speakers coupled to the floor by spikes or whatever. 

Isolating speakers on Podiums effectively eliminates this direct path, greatly reducing acoustic problems in the process. Once my whole system was isolated this way it was shocking how great an improvement it made. One can easily expend a great deal of time and effort trying to damp and remove this, when it is far easier and more effective to eliminate the problem at its source.

Yea, real bad idea. Probably the worst is to stack one on top of the other. 

I replaced BDR Cones under my rack with Pods. The improvement was easy to see. Not hear, see! My rack is 750lbs solid concrete and granite. Even so when I would walk up my weight would make it rock. On Cones it would rock very fast and a small amount that was hard to see. But my tone arm uses a weight on the end of fishing line for side bias. The weight swinging back and forth was a dead giveaway that the rack had moved.

Now on Pods it is a lot easier to see the rack sway. I'm sure it swings more now than before. But, and this is the important part, at a much lower frequency. Well below anything that matters. This is easy to see as the side bias weight almost never swings at all. So even though the whole rack moves it is moving way down below 4Hz - probably more like 1 or 2 Hz- which might as well be motionless. It is really mind blowing the way this huge massive rack can move so smooth and slow from even the slightest touch. Even the gentle pressure of putting the cue lever down will move it. I can also touch gently with a finger and stop it. Crazy!

mglik, So it is safe to say you're trying to tell us Townshend is four times as good? 😂 Sorry man, couldn't resist.

I'm not real big on measurements, much prefer to give credence to what myself and others actually hear. But the laser thing, vs the iPad seismograph, what would you say is the difference, astolfor?

So kinda what I thought, within margin of error, so to speak. Yeah they are pretty remarkable. Once you get used to hearing speakers on them it is kinda hard for anything not on Podiums to compare.

astolfor- It is interesting your measurements show Iso Acoustics don’t even measure as well as Nobsound, as your results there mirror what people actually hear. Rapid decay is mainly what these things are all about, and so it is odd to see the older Credo design measure better, even if only slightly, than the newer Townshend.

Townshend has been making the Podium quite a long time, with the current version having come quite a ways since early days. The only Credo version I know was copied from one of those older/earlier Podiums. There’s a Credo video that pretends to show results similar to yours, and it is a quite good video, you have to watch real close to see how they deceptively manipulated to make it look that way.

All of which makes me wonder, exactly what Credo and Podium were compared? What was the speaker, how much did it weigh, and what pods were in the Podiums?

Like we need you to tell us we can make up our own minds. Where do you get this sense of self-appointed superior being from anyway?

Right. And thanks.

Another image showing how they are made. Felt on top and bottom.

Keeps posting the same crap. Why the mods allow this guy on the site, he only drags things down. Facts all wrong too. $425 per set of four right now, and that includes shipping.

Here is what a Pod looks like inside, if instead of ripping one apart destroying it in the process of trying to make it look bad you simply screw the top off.

The top piece turns to provide height adjustment for leveling. The cap inside is where the real technology comes in. Notice they are marked for load. That is because they are all the same size but with different spring rates for different component loads.

Now the most interesting part is the tiny little hole at the bottom. The black bellows material that encases the spring traps the air inside creating a bellows effect. Spring bouncing up and down forces air through the small hole. This is precision engineered to provide just the right amount of damping. This is what makes the Townshend Pods so much better than other products like Nobsound.

This tiny little hole is like putting Koni performance shocks on your car. Good shocks allow free travel to absorb small bumps in the road, but at the same time provide responsive handling by damping larger body roll type movement.

In the same way Pods isolate micro-vibrations, particularly in the audio band, while controlling resonant behavior. This absence of resonance is what reveals so much natural instrumental timbre and tone.

All from that one tiny little precision engineered hole in the top.

He probably didn’t cut anything open, the guy doesn’t even have a stereo, speakers, or anything. Just a keyboard he uses to type "hate" a thousand different ways.

Takes lousy pictures too. The key to the whole thing is a tiny little vent hole drilled in the top. Can’t see it in his lousy photo, that shows the underside when it is the top that matters.

The key to the design is the black rubber bellows captures air, and there is a very small vent hole in the top. So bouncing the spring forces air through the hole. The whole thing is designed to work like shock absorbers on a car, that allow the wheels to move a small amount for a smooth ride over bumps but damp out larger amplitude so the car doesn’t roll around curves as much.

In practice then the Pod is a spring for micro-vibrations and damped for larger moves, resulting in it filtering by something like 16dB per octave above 4Hz.

In other words a precision engineered product, as borne out in practice by everyone who tries them.

I just noticed that instead of unscrewing a Pod to show how it is made the Troll cut it up, destroying the Pod and giving a false impression of how it is made. So destructive not only of ideas and concepts but physical property too. Hard to be sure if deliberately deceptive or just incredibly inept. No reason can't be both I guess.

Ryder, Vibration control of all kinds whether ordinary plain springs, Nobsound, Townshend or whatever, generally is more effective resting directly under the component chassis than under the foot that comes on the component. Works better, looks better. The loading per spring is what makes the difference in sound, not so much where they are under the component. So you can use 3 or 4, and they can be moved around to balance the load. I use for example 4 Pods under my amp but almost all the weight is transformers in the back. So I have one each back corner, one sort of in the middle, and a 4th center front. 

Ordinary springs like Nobsound are more sensitive to loading. They tend to sound full and warm when compressed a lot, thin and extended when not loaded enough. I think the reason Nobsound vary so much is partly they are short, and this gives them a smaller optimal range, and partly they are not damped, and this gives resonance free reign.

Townshend Pods and Podiums solve both of these shortcomings with a single larger and higher quality (piano wire) spring and bellows air shock damping. Works great, as so many have found.

astralfor, Crest? I think you got the name wrong. There is a Swiss company Credo that imported Townshend Podiums 20 years ago and then copied that old version. If they are 1.8X better than current production Podiums that would be quite the trick seeing as they are knockoffs of an older version of the same thing. Either that or you really like their toothpaste.

Gain, relative permittivity and the efficiency of electrical devices can be expressed as dimensionless numbers. 

Dimensionless numbers. Check.

For a moment, think of electricity as dimensionless energy moving through 3 dimensional pathways

Dimensionless energy. Check. But- wait a minute! It is moving through dimensions?!?! Nevermind. We got ad copy to fill!

When vibration is introduced into the atmosphere at the front baffle of the loudspeakers, vibration becomes a 3-dimensional form of energy that can only dissipate by permeating into 3-dimensional objects causing an unnaturally high state of mechanical excitation to occur within them; 

Uh, what?

the objects vibrate. 

Oh. Why not just say so then?

They will continue to vibrate when music is playing and eventually establish a relatively constant state of unnaturally high equilibrium that is well known to degrade the performance of audio components.

How can equilibrium be unnaturally high? If it's high wouldn't that be disequilibrium? Nevermind!

It might be more appropriate to view Center Stage2 as a catalyst in a complex energy reaction that occurs between your equipment and its environment. 

Um, doesn't a catalyst catalyze? That is, make things go faster? So it accelerates energy interactions then? Nevermind. Ad copy!

While this amount of kinetic and vibration energy is relatively small, the sonic consequences can be very large if these energies are unregulated and undamped. 

So is it a catalyst? Or a damper? Because these are opposite and mutually exclusive, ya know?

Center Stage2 is a catalyst 

So not a damper then.

designed to change the prevailing state of equilibrium in that energy reaction and to permanently hold it in a reduced or damped state. 

Oh wait now it is a damper! And also creates disequilibrium!

Center Stage2 is different and better because it uses novel applications in material science to achieve its isolation and damping benefits. 

And catalyzing? What happened to catalyst?

Your components will now immerse you in a sonic environment that has been described as a unified acoustic field. That’s why we think our product is aptly named when we describe the listener experience as being “Center Stage”.

So now it does speaker placement too? I give up. Granted there is always the chance it works and they just prefer a deliberately nonsensical marketing narrative. Let's hope so!