Nobosound Springs

Boing boing.

@carlsbad    It's horses for courses.  If you have a floor that moves and can be driven by vibrations in the speakers then yes, go for springs.  It you have a solid floor, spikes are best.  If I lay a heavy concrete slab on footings in the ground then vibrabrations from the speakers are not going to be passed to the earth via spikes.  Why?

Because the mass of the Earth is 5.972 × 10^24 kg and your speaker weighs say 200lb, that is a 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th smaller.  If your speaker vibrates 1mm, Newton's Law says that the movement of the Earth will be utterly negligible.

@carlsbad    Thanks, but no, in fact my math is incorrect.  I forgot to divide the figure by 100 for the kg mass of the speakers, so I am left with only 22 zeros.

Yes, my experience has been that well adjusted spikes to hold the speaker utterly rigid to a good solid floor sounds cleaner and more solidly imaged than a flexible support on that floor.  After having my Martin Logan CLX Anniversaries serviced and cleaned and some cap replacements six months ago, I reinstalled on carpet with the soft feet supplied, to confirm the positioning, which I had marked with tape.  After some listening I reinstalled the spikes and stood on the rear boxes to ensure intimate contact with the floor below.  I then re-adjusted the threaded spikes and checked the vertical panels were rigid and unmoving.  The sound was distinctly (sic) improved, although this was not a blind comparison.

My floor is a new screed in a large room laid on an older one with footings below.

But anchoring to the floor only works better then flexible mounts if you have a very solid floor.  Springs/flexibles are better for everything else, although overall I don't believe the result can match spikes on a solid floor - but we don't all have solid floors.  I believe the reason is that allowing the drivers to move or vibrate relating to the listener necessarily smears the sound and particularly imaging - think of the Doppler principle but enormously reduced in magnitude.

I also mount my turntables and disc-players to the solid floor.  They stand on a 5 inch stone horizontal bridged by two similar stone verticals, each standing on a 75x22x5 inch marble horizontal spiked through to the concrete floor.  The best features of the sound is rock solid wide images and clarity of piano and voice.  Most of the highest-end TTs these days rely on mass-loading rather than suspension but their designers build in as much mass as possible.  Nevertheless they will be subject to movement and some vibration if mounted on flexible feet.  I don't go for all this gold-plated excess, preferring Simon Yorke's noughties flagship the S10 with Aeroarm.