Vibration isolation or absorption?

@whipsaw I know that Isoacoustics announced a partnership with Wolf Von Langa, although I don’t know if the SON comes with the Gaia. Mine didn’t.

I have used Starsound/LiveVibe products for the past ten years and have had all my equipment on Sistrum stands with good effect. THey were recommended by an Audiogon member who sold me his TRL Dude preamp in 2012. He was so impressed with their stands that he had them build his listening room using their technology. At the time I had a pair of Audiokinesis Jazz Modules in a room that was giving me a lot of problems, with bass in particular. I bought a used pair of Sistrum stands from Starsound and they had a profound effect on SQ when I placed the Jazz modules on them. Bass was solid and sound overall was cleaner and more articulate. Fast forward 10 years and I moved to a different house with a friendlier listening room.

I received my Wolf Von Langa SONs in early January and Colin King of Gestalt came to set them up. Once we settled on a position we put the SONs on the Sistrum stands and immediately there was a substantial improvement in the sound quality versus on the floor. I actually purchased a pair of the Gaias to try during set up, but after hearing the SONs on the Sistrum stands, we didn’t bother trying them out.

Because the Sistrums are kind of sprawling and we needed to be able to walk around the speakers to get to a bathroom behind the speakers, I talked to Robert about the current LiveVibe Rhythm Jr stands, which fit nicely under the speakers and are more substantial including larger Audiopoint and coupling discs. I also traded in the Sistrum stand under my Circle Labs M200 amp for the Rhythm stand. I recently received them and set them up and noticed another step up in sound. The soundstage is remarkably 3-dimensional and extends well behind my walls on many recordings. Bass is clean and musical. Highs such as cymbals are crystal clear and really shimmer. It should be noted that that I have no acoustic treatment in my 11x17 room so I can imagine that tweaking that would result in further improvements

A side note is that Robert offered me about 85% of original purchase price for the products I traded in, which is not bad after 10 years of ownership.

So the benefit of the LiveVibe coupling technology is clear to me. I can’t say whether decoupling would be better but I find that this technology works for me. It would be interesting to do a direct comparison to decoupling devices like the Gaia or Townshend products so maybe I’ll try that when I have some spare time..Of course OCD Mikey, who is a big LiveVibe fan, has done that already as shown in these videos (and a few more. He believes that LiveVibe stands are an improvement over the Townshends. Take YouTube SQ for what it is worth in terms of your own ability to tell a difference..

THE PROFOUND IMPROVEMENT AMPLIFIER STANDS MAKE - YouTube

LIVE VIBE AUDIO STANDS UNDER SPEAKERS ! LISTENING TEST - YouTube

@hchilcoat 

Thank you for sharing your anecdotal experiences so eloquently. As should be clear from my posts, I was never arguing that the products of Isoacoustic or Townshend are necessarily better than those produced by Robert's company. But they have clearly been well-received by a meaningful number of audiophiles, as well as some high-class component manufacturers, and I see no reasonable basis on which anyone should attempt to ridicule them.

You have a terrific system, and are probably aware that I use a Circle Labs A200. I had a similar experience to yours when placing a set of Stillpoints Ultra SS V2 under that amp. A big improvement. Could I squeeze further improvement out by utilizing a different vibration control product? Possibly, but I do have a difficult imagining that it would be significant.

I have also placed Isoacoustic Gaias under my FinkTeam KIM speakers, and am quite happy withy the result. I could imagine that Townsend Podiums, or perhaps the ones that you are using, might produce further improvements. But again, I would expect diminishing returns at best.

I would be very interested to hear your impressions if you are able to compare a Townshend Podium under your WvL SON to the LiveVibe, but I expect that you would agree that it would be nearly impossible to do so "blind".

Finally, I'm also glad to hear that your personal experiences with Robert have been positive. I have no axe to grind with him beyond what I have articulated in previous posts on this thread.

This is an interesting read

The theory of more stuff.

Vibration isolation in audio is a subject surrounded in mystery half truths and any number of wild theories. As an engineering exercise, the explanation is quite straight foreword and may be explained by the“Theoryof more stuff”.
 

Take a surface, be it the floor or a table, on which your hi fi component is placed and it is desired to reduce the vibration from thesupport to the equipment. The way this is done is to put “some stuff” between theequipment and the supporting surface. There are three possible outcomes.
 

1 The vibration in the equipment is more than the vibration in the support.
This is not possible as if it were; the energy crisis would be solved! More
out than what is put in. Free power forever! Unfortunately, this scenario
contradicts the first and second laws ofthermodynamics, so is not
possible.
 

2 The vibration in the supported equipment will be the same as in the case of no stuff. Thechances of this are one in a million because something has been changed… it may be thesame, but that is extremely unlikely, therefore, the only possibility is,
 

3 The vibration will be attenuated, to a greater or lesser degree, and this is the case.
 

There are many products out there that do in fact attenuate vibration. Be it spikes on glass, wood and slate, aluminium spikes in cups, ball bearings in cups, solid plates separated by compliant sheets, lead, Bluetack, sand, marble, concrete, the list is endless. It is also known that multiple combinations of theabove produce better results because there is morestuff. E.g. multiple platforms stacked really high.
 

The engineering approach is to get the best result in the simplest manner by optimizing the “stuff” and way back about two centuries ago the Victorian engineers came up with thesolution…. the spring! The spring may be anything “springy”, from elastic, rubber, coiled steel, straight steel, air-bladders to flexible wooden strips. As long as it has sufficient spring or compliance, when optimised with an appropriate mass, a mechanical low pass filter is realised.

The ideal is to have the resonant frequency as low as is possible, ideally around 2Hz in both the horizontal and vertical planes and with a damping ratio of about 0.16. This will give an attenuation of about 25dB at 10 Hz increasing at 20dB per decade above. This will ensure excellent isolation for the deleterious audio system vibrations which are from 5Hz to 500Hz.

In all of audio, nothing, and I mean nothing, is easier to test than the effect of vibration on a piece of solid state gear, and yet ... we have zero in terms of verified results.

It’s not hard, vendors. Put a subwoofer next to your preamp and see if it makes a difference.

Of course, tubes are another thing but even those could be measured.

I’m not saying microphonics don’t exist, I’ve definitely heard it. I had a Radio Shack phono preamp that would ring like a bell when struck, probably due to the ceramic caps in the signal path, but today? Meh.

Wake me up when there’s an iota of measured relationship between vibration and output on any piece of modern solid state gear.  Then when you've actually measured that then you can tell me what sound isolation works best.

Erik, have you watched all the videos Max Townshend made and put up on YouTube? Worth your time, at the very least.