Townshend Springs under Speakers

FWIW:  for the heck of it I tried the Nobsound (actually a similar product)under my CJ tube amps, my CJ pre amp, and also tried the Isoacoustics pucks under both.    My tube amps were on a sprung wood floor.


No difference in sound at all.

Still waiting on delivery of my Townshend speaker bars.  Should be here middle of next week.
I think that putting my speakers on the nobsound spring footers altered the frequency balance a bit along with the de-coupling effects.  No doubt due to raising the speakers a bit.  They sound was super vivid, but I think there was a tiny suck-out in the richness region, so somethings lost a bit of body, and the tone got overall a bit more open and brighter.
As I've said, I'm hoping to maintain more of the regular speaker tonality with the Townshend bars.

For those skeptical about the effects of spring footers (and it's good to be skeptical), we had a discussion over on ASR on the subject.
First I'd note that when I mentioned the sonic change from putting spring footers between my speakers and wood floor, a member there whose specialty was literally noise vibration (also did work for some turntable companies) replied:
------------------

No surprise at all.

Spikes couple the speaker to the floor so, depending on the floor type, spiking the speakers to it is just like adding a huge area cabinet vibration to the sound.
Using polymer type footers only absorbs vibration at relatively high frequencies so couples the cabinet vibration to the floor at low frequencies as well.
Springs of the correct stiffness will decouple the speaker from the floor giving a similar increase in quality to a well engineered cabinet over a crappy one but probably bigger (coupled floor area being bigger than cabinet area).
It is basic noise and vibration stuff I used to do research in 45 years ago.
As a rule of thumb for the isolation to be effective over the whole frequency range the isolating springs will deflect around 1" due to the weight of the mass being decoupled. The smaller the deflection the higher the frequency above which isolation will be taking place."
-------------------------


https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/springs-under-my-speakers-whats-happening...



Another member posted measurements showing coupling vs decoupling:


https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/speaker-de-coupling.13655/post-896618


Finally, this is very interesting.  It's a video from the Swiss speaker manufacturer Credo, explaining the effects of isolation vs a speaker sitting on a floor or spiked, demonstrated with measurements.


It includes measurements of a Townshend isolation platform along with their own platform measurements. They also measure the effects of such isolation in terms of the speaker sound in an actual room. It seems to map quite well to the effects I heard in my room:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ihzvD3urc4&t

My speaker bars arrived today.   They look great.   I also just received a set of upgraded CJ Premier 12 amps too, so I'm doing one thing at a time.  Amps first.  I'll probably get to the bars later in the week.

Decoupling speakers that actually vibrate, and which can vibrate a floor, from the floor, I get.   The effects are actually measurable.

Spring footers under a dac seem about as necessary as wings on a pig. Unless you are perhaps on a ship in a storm, it doesn't make any sense to me.  Under any normal circumstances, there is no reason whatsoever to expect it to change the sound.  No more than it would help my computer run it's software better. 

But...I'll leave it at that.

You don’t understand

Well if you or anyone else does, I’m all ears.

What’s wrong with saying I've seen no reason how it could work, and asking how it could work?

"This gets so tiresome."

Why is wondering how something does, or could work, tiresome?

Is this a place only for the most incurious consumers? I hope not.

Why shouldn’t I be able to voice my own view that spring decouplingunder speakers makes some sense, is measurable, and I’ve heard the sonic differences?

Where putting it under certain other equipment, e.g. CD players, DACs and often enough amps seems to make no sense and nobody is explaining how it could actually work?

I’ve tried the pods under my amps and pre-amp just for the heck of it.No sonic difference at all. Is this allowed, or should this be one monolithic "no questions asked" website?

Yes, I tried my Townshend C isolation pods under my heavy Premier 12 monoblocks. And under my pre-amp.   This was before I used them under my Turntable base.  I was trying tons of different isolation materials and footers.    (As well as Isoacoustic and other footers...no sonic change).

I also tried the Nobsound-type spring footers under both as well.

But in the audiophile world, the only subjective experience that counts is someone who claims  positive results.  Negative results never count against a claim ;-)

"Oh, you must have crappy gear or cloth ears...that's why you hear no difference.  Because it couldn't be that I'm imagining anything."  ;-)

Anyway, I'll be trying my Townshend isolation bars under my speakers soon to decouple from my springy wood floors, where it's actually plausible it could make a difference. 

Yes tvad.  It's a "they don't know what they don't know" scenario.

There's a whole lot more to understanding the characteristics of sound than believing Miles' trumpet sounds more burnished when you put your cables on a riser.

Ah, the Golden Ears response strikes again.

"I can hear angels singing when I replaced my amp fuses. You can’t? Oh, that’s because you can’t hear. But you’ll just have to take my unverifable opinion that it isn’t my imagination, so I can Lord It Over You without having to give an ounce of proof for my claim."

Millercarbon, do you make your living actually working in sound professionally?

I do. Both for film and TV and I’ve recorded music in studios. I record and manipulate sound all day long.


You can’t get away with bullshit claims when other pros are there to check your work. (And it’s not like, for instance, selling high end gear to impressionable laymen).



I just finished literally matching the air tones from the scene of one room to another, barely picked up in the dialogue track. If I get it wrong, I’ll hear about it.


I just carefully manipulated the sounds of gently falling snow. Alsohad to cut together several different dogs, from different recordings, minutely manipulating the timbre and EQ of each and selecting just the right bits, so it could be used for a single dog and the listener won’t know it.



Right now I am finely balancing a session with 30 stereo tracks and 36 mono tracks. Which is a modest show - I’ve done movies with twice that number of tracks. Balancing so that each element is playing a part, some just barely heard.


And if I couldn’t do this all day every day, and if someone has a sonic idea, or a complaint, and I didn’t understand the nature of sound in order to produce what is required, I’d be out of a job.


Some audio reviewer friends say my ears are betterfor identifying characteristics in gear they review than theirs. Further, sometimes musicians I know bring over their mastering choices to my place where they ask me to help them go over sometimes minute differences in deciding what to go with or fix.



So, go ahead, on an audiophile forum you can play the Golden Ears game. That wouldn't get you far in my world.  It’s laughable if you are implying a lack of acuity because I didn’t hear anything with a footer under my amp. Some of us do sound for a living, we don’t just play at it.

charles1dad,


Just per your comment: Yeah, it is. Creatively can be very satisfying.


However, in the movie business as a sound designer/editor, my work is last in line. A sound mix is generally set in stone, far in advance, as all sorts of productions are competing for studio time, and everyone has their hard airing (for TV) or release date deadlines, and the mix is the last big creative process, then it’s sent off.


Basically that means that EVERYONE else in all the jobs leading up to the sound edit can stretch or fudge time. So it can be "well the writing took longer...or the production...or the editing...or the visual effects" etc.Everyone can be "late" to some degree. Not me. There is a single, hard mix date we have to have everything ready for, the productions costing millions of dollars, mix time hundreds of thousands.
Being late is career suicide. (With the rare exception that picture changes necessitate "flying in" sounds to the mix). Therefore, in 30 years I have never been late.

Every time I talk I hire a contractor who changes schedule on me, or "things take longer" I shake my head. What a position to be in.



So, yeah, it can be awfully stressful at times. Right now I have to finish 7 movies before Christmas!!!

Anyway, me and my cloth ears will be evaluating the Townshend speaker bars, after I finish evaluating some updated Conrad Johnson amps I just bought.   Gotta do one thing at a time.

charles,
I can easily switch from work to audiophile mode.  I do it every day.Also, I can generally "turn off" my sound editing mode to watch movies.

grannyring I agree and it's a point I've made many times on other sites.

For instance I'm an active member on the Audio Science Review forum, and it's funny that here I get the reputation of being some hard nosed "objectivist" while over there I'm often seen as a subjectivist who has infiltrated their ranks ;-)

On that forum the general approach is pursuing technical accuracy through a measurements oriented approach.   This does NOT mean they are, like the strawman often raised,  a bunch of audio Spocks who don't care about sound.    Rather they tend to want audible effects verified and correlated to measurements.  A laudable goal! 


The result though, especially with the owner of the forum, is a heavy bias towards measurements and a dismissal of the use of subjective descriptions and subjective audio reviews.

Whereas I have constantly made the case for the worth of subjective audio reviews and audiophiles sharing their subjective reports of equipment.

As much as I absolutely admire and support the project on that site, it does not fully satisfy me as I find trading subjective impressions and descriptions of sound an important, rewarding and often useful aspect of the audiophile hobby.   By our very nature sound produces subjective effects, that's the whole point of a sound system for music, and I want to hear about "what X sounded like" and I want to tell others "what X sounded like."

So while I do work in pro sound, I am a life long audiophile who cares about and listens for all the same things other audiophiles care about.I want more "air" in my system, more realistic clarity and subtle detail, more convincing imaging and soundstaging, as much timbral harmonic nuance as I can possibly get, and on and on.


Notice I described hearing much the same sonic effects others (and reviewers) have heard when I placed spring-based footers under my speakers.


I'm obsessive about comparing real instruments and voices to reproduced (and have done direct comparisons with sound systems - recording instruments we play at our house and family voices, and comparing those played back through sound systems directly with the real thing).

Even my audio reviewer pal thinks I'm obsessive in the level of detail I care about :-)

Right now I'm comparing two sets of amplifiers: my original Conrad Johnson Premier 12 tube monoblocks with a pair of Premier 12s that have been upgraded with Teflon caps and different tubes.  I'm listening for, and hearing,  all the things we talk about around here: changes in imaging, soundstagind, lack of grain, changes in frequency response, changes in bass depth/tightness, changes in the highs, changes in timbre, tonal subteties etc. 


But back to the point:  I find that those on the ASR site, to the extent they disparage subjective reviews, just don't seem to be listening the way I listen, and listening for what I listen for.  So the things I care about often aren't addressed in the extremely brief subjective snippets given for reviews there.  People there generally seem to have an allergy to getting too detailed about describing sound, lest they start sounding like an audio reviewer they tend to decry, and for me this ends up being a deficit.   Which is why I still come to the subjective forums to exchange views.

mahgister,

Interesting solution!   It must be really sonically satisfying.


I'm sensitive to aesthetics in my set up, so would be very unlikely to employ such a tweak.

In fact I've been shedding gear.   Just sold off my subwoofers, crossover.The room looks (and sounds) better without them IMO. 


It's actually a relief to simply.

Though I'm not finished in the tweaky area of things.  I'm still doing ongoing comparisons of two amps, tube rolling etc.   But hopefully that will be over with soon and then back to just listening to the music.

Well, I’ve completed my Townshend Speaker Bars experience.

I shipped them back to Townshend.

First, please understand the following is just my experience/preference, not a diss of the Townshend products. I still use the wonderful Townshend pods under my turntable.

As I mentioned before (in this or other threads) my interest in the Townshend bars was sparked first by how well the seismic isolation pods worked under my turntable platform. They measurably reduced vibration transfer to the turntable, especially from floor born impacts, in a way no other isolation device came close to achieving. So I knew they "really did something."


I also found the on-line Townshend demos of the speaker isolation devices very intriguing.


To quickly check spring decoupling for my speakers I bought a version of the nobsound spring footers. The difference in sound with the springs under my speakers really amazed me. They displayed many of the attributes attributed to the Townshend products: speakers disappeared more, more and finer detail, more relaxed sounding etc.

However, there was a step back in one of the main areas I’m most sensitive about: density and impact of the sound. This is an attribute I have worked to get in to my system. With the spring footers, the sound just got a bit too light and featherweight sounding, less dense, less impact and connection. It became a bit more "electrostatic like" in the experience. Also the tonal balance got a little too brilliant and light, less rich.

How much of this was due to the isolation and how much due to the raising of the speakers was hard to be sure of.

Ultimately I preferred the sound of my speakers sitting on the carpeted wood floor. The slight loss of finesse was made up for by restoring the punch and density tonal balance and to me realism of the sound.

Given the Townshend speaker bars (which I had reason to prefer over the podiums) were more highly engineered to the goal, and also wouldn’t alter the speaker height by much, my hopes were for similar gains, with fewer drawbacks.

Townshend were excellent to deal with, btw, as a customer.

The results in my system: I was surprised that I didn’t hear as much of a difference as I was expecting. I mean, the sound was definitely different...it just wasn’t obviously better.

The speakers disappeared *slightly* more (not as much as with the nobsound springs!), and the sound slightly relaxed (too much IMO). And a good thing, the sound didn’t thin out nearly as much as with the cheaper spring products. Plus, a good amount of impact was maintained.

But...the "good" just wasn’t enough to outweigh the "bad" for me. I found the tonal balance altered to darker and more lush, which actually sounded a bit less natural and real to me. I liked the more airy, open, vivid tonal balance with the speakers on the floor. Also, there was some loss in density and impact. Put together, I just connected more to the sound with the speakers sitting on the floor.

I tried all sorts of variations over time: Wondering if a sort of split-the-difference may work, I tried a single set of speaker bars under either the front or rear of the speaker. I did combinations with the nobsound spring footers. I did combinations with isacoustic products. Various adjustments to speaker rake, height etc. Anything I could think of.

Every time, the speakers sounded better to me just sitting on the floor.

So, unfortunately, back they went to Townshend (30 day trial period).

I’d liked the bars to have improved my system’s sound. But I’m also fine with getting that tweak out of my system. In the end, since I use more than one speaker in and out of my system, not having to mess with speaker bars/platforms is a good thing too.

I’d still recommend anyone intrigued by the Townshend speaker isolation products to give them a try. Clearly many have had great results.