Geez! For the last forty years, I've followed Linn's maxim that the speaker should not move a millimeter. In other words when I place my hand on the speaker it should not move side to side, back and forth, not rock at all! Time and time again I've heard demonstrations of this by simply loosening/tightening one spike allowing the speaker to move just a little and notice a smearing of the signal. I remember one demo where Linn did this to a pair of speakers by loosening a spike on each speaker stand a bit and as I listened, persons standing next to each speaker pressed down hard on the tops of them to keep them from rocking. Everyone heard the difference easily. The reason? Simple, the tweeter and many midrange drivers' pistonic motion, throw, is tiny, and just a small amount of movement of the cabinet will blur the signal from them. How a device like the Townshend or Sorbothane (useless), or any products that introduce a rocking motion to the speaker helps. I understand where an entire floor of a room floor on a suspension system helps isolate it from the outside but that's it. I've heard Townshend's devices a couple of times. Once under a large heavy pair of floor standing active ATC's and a pair of Proacs. They did nothing but screw things up and I'll bet both companies wouldn't recommend them in any circumstance.
Speaker Spikes - Working Principle
Vibration damping obvious makes sense (in speakers just as well as in cars).
That involves 'killing' (converting into heat, through typically internal friction) kinetic energy. So any sort of elastic material (rubber has lots of internal friction) makes sense.
And then there are spikes. Using a pointy hard object and pair it with a softer, elastic material (to deform, and kill kinetic energy) can work; think metal sharp spike into carpet or wood floor.
But what is the idea behind pairing fairly unelastic metal (brass for example) with similarly unelastic (brass, stone, etc) material (example photo provided)? Only thing I can come up with: LOOKS good and makes owner feel good thinking its an improvement (works only for Audiophiles though),
Even more curious: are they ENGINEERED "spikes" (vibration dampers or shock absorbers) for speakers that are TUNED for the frequency (and mass) that needs to be dampened? Can piston style fluid dampers be designed for the high frequencies (100, 1000, 10000 Hz) using geometry, nozzles size and viscosity of the fluid?
Showing 2 responses by vitussl101
@kraftwerkturbo Really? You thought I meant that a tweeters motion is moving the cabinet. I reread your question and my response and I suppose that I should have said that the bass drivers in the speaker cabinet would cause a slight motion, enough to blur the image coming from the tweeter, and possibly midrange because of the pistonic motion of these drivers are so short. So the spikes are there to keep the speaker from moving, hopefully, not at all. Not a millimeter if possible. I thought that this was obvious. And the Linn demonstration of loosening a single spike on each speaker stand was to introduce this rocking motion, and then pressing down on top of the speakers was to stop that rocking motion. That's it! Nothing else. All that blather about vibration control and dampening is something else for another topic. The stuff I discussed were simple explanations, examples that anyone in the room could hear. Not poor or wrong science applied or applications of physics. |