To couple, or not to couple, that is the question

Damping is using a material or device to take the energy out of vibration by transferring it to heat. The shock absorber on a car forces oil or gas through small passages. That takes energy, which becomes heat, in the process damping suspension movement. Materials like sorbothane, cork, a phone book, anything like that is a form of damper.

Damping only works when the two parts are coupled together. Therefore, damping is a form of coupling. The difference is when the material being coupled is rigid and inflexible we call this coupling. When the material is soft and yielding we call it damping. Either way, coupling.

Decoupling, or isolation, allows the isolated component to vibrate freely on its own. Because if it touches anything the physics of mechanical vibration dictates this vibration will propagate into the adjacent material.

We all know if you hit a table, the water in the glass across the other side of the table will move. There is even a famous movie where the first hint of the T Rex is the water in the glass. The glass that is in the car. The car with shock absorbers. Dampers. Coupled to the ground, car, glass, water.

Even with all that earth, tires, dampers, dashboard, and glass in the way the footsteps of the dinosaur travel right on through to the water. Only slowly. The vibrations are slowed and smeared, but still there. We all know this, which is why Spielberg uses it.

Damping is a form of coupling. It is damping and coupling that slows and smears. It is isolation that alleviates this. QED.

What damped springs?

"How about for monitors on stands? Between the stand & floor or between stand & speaker?"
Follow and apply the logic of isolation. Anything touching anything else sets the whole thing ringing. Isolation works by minimizing the amount of stuff ringing. Springs under the stand leaves the speaker/stand to ring. Springs under the speaker isolates from the stand minimizing the amount of stuff subject to ringing. So that’s the way to go. 

In the beginning and for quite some time all my efforts were with speaker cables. Power cords and interconnects were routed away from each other, but with no attempt at isolation. 

Until one day I had all these extra speaker cable elevators laying around and thought, what about power cords? Much to my surprise the improvement was almost as great as under speaker cables.

One day looking at my turntable, the phono leads going down to the gain stage touch the rack at both ends. Surely whatever vibration is in the rack winds up transmitting along the lead into the arm and this can't be good. So I rigged up a way to suspend the phono leads at both ends. Very nice improvement!

My friend in Belgium with a killer Magico Q7 system tried this, was floored at the improvement. 

Gradually over time my whole system has been isolated and floats like this. Power cords, even the ones going to subs, benefit about as much as anything. This I find odd, because suspending the 3 power cords going to my subs seems to make an even bigger difference than the power cords themselves! The only thing I can think of is, without isolation they wind up feeding vibrations into the conditioner and everything else, just like the phono leads into the arm. 

Isolation is so important, it even predominates with the power cord going into the motor pod of my Sovereign turntable. I've upgraded turntable motor power cords before, always with a nice result. But was disappointed with the Sovereign. Odd, since the power cord being used was a lot better than anything I had done this with before. I could only surmise maybe because it is so stiff?

So after a few failed experiments I thought well if isolation is so important maybe instead of all this crazy good expensive wire that is thick and stiff how about try cheap hook up wire that is soft and flexible? Just for the last few inches into the motor.

I soldered this to a spare IEC and connected a Synergistic power cord. Success! Isolation uber alles!

Snilf, you are not deluded, and your friend (and anyone else lauding coupling) is misunderstanding the big picture. Yes in theory, in the perfect world of imagination (utopia, literally “nowhere”) then being fixed and unmoving is the way to go. 
 

Only problem, we live in the real world. In the real world when the speaker cone moves one way the speaker cabinet moves the other. The result is not what the couplers would have you believe, robbing the music of dynamics and detail. The mass of the cabinet is so much greater than the moving mass of the cone and coil this might as well be zero. 

What happens instead is the vibrations from the driver propagate out from the baffle, around the sides and back, down into the floor. Vibrations never just flow like water in one direction. Agitate some water and see. Waves travel out until they hit something and reflect back. If this was just the speaker floating in space that would be the end of the story. Very quickly the cabinet (which is specifically designed to dissipate and end vibrations) would stop vibrating.

But the speaker is on the floor and so sets the floor to vibrating. Unlike the speakers the floor is not designed to be nonresonant. So now the floor is vibrating. The speaker is on the floor. Speaker and floor are a resonant system. Floor is connected to walls, walls to ceiling. In no time flat everything in the room is vibrating. All because you played some music. 
 

That’s with speaker coupled to floor. Speaker isolated from floor, now stops much faster. Where coupling obscures detail by getting lost in endless resonance, isolation reveals detail by reducing ringing. 
 

What you are hearing is with only a very limited and skewed form of isolation. Springs are much better. You can buy ordinary ones on Amazon for peanuts. But springs need to be tuned to the mass of the component to work well. This is a pita to find. So a better budget solution is Nobsound springs as then you adjust for load by changing the number of springs. 
 

This still leaves us with the problem of resonance. We have eliminated a lot but there’s still some because the springs aren’t damped. But too much damping and the spring reverts to something closer to sorbothane, which we don’t want. 
 

The optimal damping factor, at least according to Townshend, is only about 1%. This seemingly minuscule damping factor seems to be the main thing that accounts for the profound improvement of Pods and Podiums over Nobsound. 
 

That’s the theory. I never trust theory that much. So I tried all this stuff. All sorts of cones and spikes. Sorbothane. Ordinary springs, Nobsound, and finally Townshend. It’s not even close. 
 

But just in case you trust neither my theory nor my ears (which I always say do NOT! DYODD) then you can always check out the yt video where Max Townshend shows a seismic iPad that demonstrates visually and clearly exactly what I am talking about.