Monitor users, isolation?

I'm using V-pads (like the Mapleshade cork/rubber thingys on top of the stand(Same effect as Herbies, but cheaper), bamboo (Cheap at Ross or TJ Maxx) cutting board on the pads and spiked speakers on top. Works great!

You want it rigidly coupled to a high mass stand. The more the speaker is allowed to move about the worse it will sound. A flimsy stand or soft material between speaker and stand is not good. A stand like a Sound Anchor will make a HUGE difference in how a speaker sounds.

http://www.soundanchors.com/page53.html

I'm using 3 posted Sound Anchor stands so a shelf between stand and speaker wouldn't work.

Blue-tack between the speaker bottom and the steel stand filled with sand on spikes . Each stand weighs @ 35lbs.

My monitors are usually shelf mounted. I place a 1/2 inch bamboo cutting board on top of the shelf and a thin layer of cork on top of that and then the speaker on top of that. Eats up vibrations very well (lots of truck and bus traffic in Queens).

With my floorstanders I do basically the same thing ... a 1 inch bamboo cutting board on top of the hardwood floor. On top of the cutting board is a 2" thick piece of Auralex acoustic foam. Eats up vibrations equally as well.

Regards, Rich

All approaches are decoupling the acoustic device from its environment. Vibration is the method by which we hear. Knowing how to reapply and direct that vibration is the key. Why kill what we try so hard to reproduce? How efficient can that be? The end user is the looser with all described above.. Tom

Tom:

Depending on where and how you live, you may need to decouple the speaker from its environment. Coupling a speaker to a floor doesn't make sense in an apartment setting as all that you have done is provide a larger area to disperse the vibrations across ... namely your neighbor's apartment. No surprise that there are quite a number of sub woofer complaints in most apartment buildings.

Additionally, on heavily trafficked streets, you do get regular shaking of furniture, including speakers, when buses and trucks pass by. How else do you propose dealing with this other than to isolate components, including speakers? Watching the pendulum on our grandfather clock move in a different patterm is a visible indication of what the floorstanding speakers must be experiencing.

Regards,

Rich

There are coupling devices that are designed to be directional much like a mechanical diode. Meaning they will reject low frequencies passing thru the structure of your home or apartment. Keep in mind that this low frequency hash is poluting your electronics as well. It will modulate transformes, tubes, transports as well as all the circuit boards along the way. What this means is the music you are trying so hard to accurately reproduce is being infiltrated by the noise you are sucessfully traping. Even without any external help from the neighborhood, all electronic and mechanical devices produce and have the capacity to store their own noise. This will be regenerated along with the music. One way in and no way out is not the remedy. Tom

I use Herbies big dots, three each speaker, between my Dynaudio Special 25's and Dynaudio stands. I like them a lot, very stable, sound nice, and I don't have to mar the speaker veneer with the spikes.

Symposium Rollerblocks double stacked between my monitors and their stands. This is a very significant improvement in sound.