Tough Nut Cones Isolation for loudspeakers, brilliant solution over spikes


I wanted to share with everyone an experience I had with trying to decide how to decouple my Arendal 1723 THX Monitors and their stands from the floor. 

Most of us know now that the days of thinking metal spikes were the best idea are over. It generates immense pounds per square inch of pressure into one point and all that energy is then transferred to the floor.... the last thing we want to do with speakers. Many mid-fi to high-end loudspeakers now ship with isolation footers/feet instead of spikes.
I happened across a FANTASTIC video from Jay's Iyagi:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32DrKCqLWkk&t=788s 
Immediately upon watching that video, based on measurements from Jay, I contacted Derrick at Tough Nut Cones in Canada. So for $170 per stand/speaker I bought the Medium Cones. Derrick and his wife were amazing to talk to and deal with. 
So I now have them installed.... the sound is truly brilliant. And the cones are just "pointy" enough that they work on both solid floors and carpeted floors (as I have) and they look really wicked under the stands.

audiotruth

Showing 2 responses by sokogear

My speakers are kind of thin towers and spikes make me nervous that they could tip over. The speakers came with spikes that extend beyond the cabinets (KEF R500). I got Symposium Acoustics platforms that have multiple internal layers that both isolate the speaker from my hard wood floors and decrease (drain) the internal vibrations within the speaker cabinet. You see some more expensive speakers have this type of platform at the bottom of their speakers and  usually some type of fat spike under them. The guy at Symposium was very helpful and not pushy at all. He makes some kind of discs that could go under the platforms, but said it might not be good to ride the height of the speaker from the original design, plus of course adding instability to the tall thin speakers. 

They make several different platforms that he can recommend based on the budget and weight application. He cut them specially fro the dimensions of my speakers. Best of all the sound improvement was immediately noticeable with a more focused clearer sound. He under promised and over delivered.

@audiotruth - you may be skeptical, because you may not have a bad vibration control issue, for example if you are on a slab and if your speakers are far from a turntable, etc. I can assure you the cones or whatever isolation you consider do reduce the vibration, it is probably that the improvement isn't noticeable.

I put roller blocks under my phono stage and amp, and the improvements were not noticeable. Under my turntable, the Townshend platform was the most immediately noticeable (and this is used on top of a wall mounted shelf) followed by the speaker platforms. 

Just because I didn't immediately notice the improvement under the amp and phono stage doesn't mean the overall noise floor wasn't lowered.