I used to have a subwoofer on sorbothane hemispheres and the cabinet would vibrate like crazy. Now spike-coupled to a concrete block, cabinet resonance reduced.
@@johnpoo1662 I would say it's more down to poor construction of the subwoofer you could always advise on any sub or speaker put a concrete 2-inch paving slab on top stop any movement and sharpen up the bass
I have always been vexed by the difference between decoupling and spikes, even under components. They clearly sound different, but I can’t quite figure out which is better. I kind of lean towards decoupling just because it makes more sense to me, but who knows? One of life’s great mysteries.
From my FRF measurements as an engineer several years ago with floor vibration, speaker spikes did the inverse of what they claimed do do, they decrease transmissibility from the speaker to the floor through carpeting.
My room is 28×14 and upstairs above the kitchen/dining area. I use halved racquet balls under the sub feet and place them atop 4, 15lbs garden pavers. That made the most dramatic improvement to my room response thus far. Cleared the mud and tightened the low end
I grew up a old wood house in a time of albums. Coupling speakers to the floor meant that your albums sounded like crap. When you are a teen to 20's keeping the volume down was also not a option. It was so bad that we always recorded albums on cassette right out of the paper sleeve just to take the turntable out of the equation. I found out as a kid that if I picked my speakers up off the floor some and put a piece of carpet padding between the speaker and the thing it was sitting on mom didn't yell so much and it sounded better. It took about another minute to figure out that speaker placement on all axis's was more important then where they looked good. When I got a little older I moved to my first Slab house. Totally different world. Then the goal was just to stop the speakers from walking. All that came to a end the day I bought my first set if Infinity RS IIIa's. Four foot tall and weigh as much as a small car. No matter what surface you set and forget. On a wood decked floor with a hard surface attached to it today I may use some felt or something just so the two wood surfaces would not touch but that is about all. It's all about the box and what surface it sits on.
Interesting comment about the energy being transferred directly in to the cabinet rather than only discussing sound waves that travel trough the air inside the cabinet. Chris clearly has deep knowledge about speaker design.
The problem with the cabinet resonnances is that they are NOT a part of the music. But rather artifact of trying to hold the moving elements in place. So by coupling that, you will give sounds to the floor that is NOT a part of the music. By isolating the speakers from the floor. The only sound that will come out in the room are those that come from the elements. And the vibration energy will be absorbed by the isolation material.
Coupling the box to the floor will effectively give the box more mass, which should reduce some of the resonances, but will also transfer some of the resonances into the floor. That's why Chris clarified that the material that makes up the floor matters so much. Also, lower frequencies are meant to be felt by the whole body, not just heard, so coupling the environment for LF can give a more visceral sense of the music. Ideally, speaker boxes have no resonance at all for most of the audible range.
Ideally you want; 1.) infinitely high mass baffle for the acoustic wave-launch 2.) zero energy transferred 𝘮𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 from the loudspeaker cabinet to the floor
The clever design of my Le Contour Stabile 160 floor standers (made by Lavardin), has a "base" for the speaker to sit on, made out of plywood and painted black. The differences between on/off is huge, and with the bases in place, the 3 spikes underneath the speaker, can then rest in these drilled holes for em'. It tightens everything up and now it's pretty easy to move these around for perfect set-up. Cheers from Denmark
Decoupling is better if you couple it to the floor the bass drops through the floor if you got turntables it's a real no no Best to put your speakers on 3"+ cellulose foam covering the whole bottom of the speaker. With narrow floorstanders you probably want to to use double-sided sticky tape and attach it to the bottom and bit wider than the speaker. Covering your speaker as well helps with sound resonance smearing the sound use a natural cotton towel, big speakers a beach towel or bath towel
The problem with resonnances also is inversly proportional with weight. The cheapest speakers are lighter in weight, and hence vibrate more than more expensive speakers. So if you have a 100 pound plus speaker, the vibrations that comes down to the surface below is much less than with a light 30 to 40 pound cheap floorstander.
Any material vibrating other than the speaker cones usually only add distortion and smears the details. Decoupling the speakers with foam or rubber feet can greatly help. Spikes are not making sense to me.
The spikes act as a physical diode, giving vibrations a one-way path away from the speakers. That's why floor material and construction are important to that method. Coupling speakers to tongue and groove over joists has the effect of driving the floor like a passive radiator, greatly tightening up the bass, as well as giving that tactile feel that some people love so well. Roger Waters' bass on DSOTM will vibrate your spinal column!
@@HareDeLune How is a spike working as a physical diode? A spike made of metal that doesn't actually flex or allow the motion to decouple will transfer the same energy as any other thicker metal rod. If using spikes, you can avoid things to shift in the horizontal dimensions as the spike can dig into a soft surface like wood. And if you use spikes through a carpet, you are more directly coupled to the floor material compared to resting the speakers on the soft carpet. Using the floor as a passive radiator is possibly adding to the total acoustical output as your energy transfer efficiency will increase but so will the total harmonic distortion. I've seen measurements of 30% THD from floor material getting involved. Typically such material also has serious unpredictable resonance issues making the overall frequency response very unpredictable and uneven. The same can easily happen when you install in-wall or in-ceiling speakers and your walls or ceiling act as a speaker cabinet. Actually, I like the sound of electrostatics, planar, ribbon, and such transducers, and servo subwoofers for being loyal to the audio in the time domain and always aim at avoiding contributors like messy reflections and vibrating resonant surfaces that especially ruin the decay performance.
@@ThinkingBetter I am not a Physics professor, or a Physical Engineer. I cannot explain to you technically how it works, but I can humbly point out that the evidence that it *does* work in the way I have described is in the vibrating floor, and in hearing cleaner, tighter bass. I don't honestly know how much energy from vibrating floorboards exists in the audible spectrum, but my guess is very little, if any.
@@HareDeLune You made me curious about this "mechanical diode" claim. I like to understand how this is even possible and can find only some pseudoscience explanations specific for audio rather than actual science. I personally use some rubber pads under my subwoofers that help decoupling them quite nicely and they work in a completely understood way e.g. same way as decoupling your car's engine's vibrations through rubber motor mounts. It's great if you have a positive effect of using spikes. My guess is that theoretically, you should have a cleaner bass due to your speakers being held more firmly in place reducing forward/backward motions of the entire speaker at low bass frequencies.
@@ThinkingBetter My woofer cabinets came with rubber feet, which I later replaced with some DIY spikes, as I was poor and also enjoy DIY. Having the spikes in place instead of the rubber feet sounded much, much better to my ears. Also, placing a weight of approximately two pounds on top of each cabinet produced even more pleasing results. While I like and appreciate science very much, I am not a scientist myself. I've always been more of an artist. While my DIY experiments with my own system in my own home may seem quaint or rustic to you, they have meant much more enjoyment of my system and listening to music through it to me. My system of measurement is careful and critical listening with my own ears. While this may be fallible and subjective to a large degree, it also happens to be one and the same with how I enjoy music and using my system to that ultimate purpose. Therefore, I have been quite satisfied so far with my own methods, crude as they may be.
I found that placing inexpensive Herbies cone/spike pucks beneath my Vandy 2CE spikes removed the muddiness resulting in much cleaner bass. Well recorded tracks sound more dynamic with the caveat that poorly recorded tracks sound a bit thin because they cannot benefit from bass transmission through the floor.
Nice video, Paul. Thanks. Chris somewhat sufficiently addressed the question but obviously lacks experience with extreme versions of superior implemention from a vibration management perspective. Otherwise Chris would have been very clear about which strategy reigns far superior over the other. One key note. Mechanical energy has basic behaviors and these behaviors do not change between low frequencies and mid/high frequencies. Therefore, if a strategy or methodology is truly superior in one frequency range then it is superior for the entire frequency bandwidth. Where confusion sets in is when inferior designs, methods, materials, and/or implementations are employed and like most anything else when given only a token effort, the results are little more than minimal and a crapshoot at that. Please don't get me wrong. I like Chris. He has a very pleasant professional demeanor and he's obviously an expert of sorts with speaker design. Still that should not automatically imply that he is an expert at superior forms of vibration mgmt. Thanks for sharing.
Just because it's better to use rope instead of silly string to make a butterfly net doesn't mean that the handle to support the weight is strong enough. In this case silly string is best because the weight of the rope would snap the handle. If the box isnt dense and rigid enough to absorb the woofer's energy he's saying it would be best to couple it (or the box will ring presumably)
Chris in my opinion was clearly encouraging you to audition and experiment with the alternative “solutions”. Try them and decide for yourself which makes the music sounds better and more enjoyable to you.
@@ToadStool942 Sure. My response was really a comment in reply to your comment about the video. The video was discussing the best way to anchor a speaker. Toward the end of the video, Chris, having talked about “coupling” or “de coupling” speakers does not definitively say which is better or worse but rather suggests that the viewer (of the video in this case) is free and encouraged to experiment with both and make their own mind up as to which is better. I was in turn encouraging you to do the same. Whilst not everyone fully understands the physics surrounding this subject it’s great to experiment to work out what sounds better to the individual listener and this was in defence if Chris following your slight criticism of his content.
@@andrewjacob4185 Understood. What I was implying was that based on Chris' own words about coupling and decoupling methods, these are 2 diametrically opposed methods with very different results. The fact that Chris cannot determine which is the clearly superior method is in direct conflict with the video's title. Chris is a nice guy with areas of expertise but clearly superior means of vibration mgmt is not among them. That was my point.
In my experience most normal/limited range speakers sounds the best with spikes, so I'm thinking that full range speakers could sound the best with rubber feet since there's more energy in the low frequencies. Like a subwoofer and how they usually sound better with rubber feet. Just a theory on my part.
It depends on the speaker and the floor. In general, though, when you get the amount of deflection and rate right with sorbothane it will do wonderous things.
I think isolation is the way to go. Personally I use industrial springs to decouple the speakers. You will be surprised how much a speaker interacts with the room, especially in the UK with small rooms, concrete floors and solid walls. Using the springs, has reduced any room boom and has made the bass sound a lot more rhythmic. The speaker also sounds a lot more detailed, because the tiny vibrations in the structure are not making their way to the speaker cone, which moves fractions of a millimeter.
Paul, don’t shut Chris down while he’s still ticking! Sounds like we could’ve got a couple more minutes (at least) out of him on this interesting topic.
@Fat Rat I’m a meat a potatoes rocker. Like ac/dc from Back in Black onwards. I really don’t care for stuffing in my boxes. And as long as the speakers don’t crawl across the floor, I’m good. Maybe when I get older and all growed up, I will start listening to violin music more and start discernment of the tonal qualities.
@Fat Rat I can’t recall not one iron butterfly tune. I been thunderstruck by my own design. Sheer luck driven by determination. That probably don’t make sense but the ends justifies the means. It’s a long way to the top of you want to rock n roll.
@Fat Rat never heard that song on the radio at all in the late 70’s on Detroit radio. There’s got to be a reason why some cities do and some don’t. Like AC/DC was not played in Detroit in the 70’s but Ted Nugent was. It’s...A...Conspiracy!
I think several 15’s nearing 120db is fun with ear plugs in and at 3 feet or less. I really don’t need soundstage so much, therefore I don’t think Paul’s speaker is gonna cut it for me.
@Fat Rat oh, I’ve still got Luxi - as you say nothing lasts forever and I may need her up the track one day 🇦🇺 and yes enjoy the music!. Fast forward a decade and a half and that’s where you’ll find me lol...
@Fat Rat back at ya. Did you know that we’re Covid free this past month in my state and only 6 cases in the last seven days nationally. Amazing effort by the whole country! Be well . Be safe...
Don't (reputable) speaker manufacturers consider the natural cabinet resonance when voicing/tuning their design? In that case, won't rigidly coupling the enclosure with spikes change the "signature" sound? Or is signature sound just a marketing term for "at this price point everything's a compromise" :p
Definitely a matter of taste as well as being a 'no wrong or right way to do it' scenario. In my case, my stand mount speakers are coupled to my very solid, sand-filled, 100 lb steel stands with multiple points of blu tack. The stand then has spiked feet and is decoupled from the concrete basement floor it sits on. Regarding that blu tack, I have done a lot of experimentation with this and contrary to the common directive of putting four pea-sized points of tack in each corner under the speaker I have found that using a couple dozen pea-sized pieces of blu tack under the speaker coupling it to the stand actually results in a better transfer of resonances to the stand and getting a tighter, quicker bass, cleaner sound, with more apparent detail throughout.
Interesting. Right now I have Wharfedale EVO 4.2's on sand filled heavy stands sitting on carpeted wood flooring. Small poly pads between speaker and stands. I'm wondering if putting spikes under the stands might be beneficial. System sounds pretty good as is.
@Fat Rat I actually use the Ikea bamboo cutting boards for isolating my mono-blocks and Preamp. They are pretty popular with audiophiles in the US. A lot of vinyl guys use them for TT's too. Interesting use for speakers, I could see where that would be effective.
A variable in this topic is floor type, in USA the options are typically suspended wood floor or concert slab. Couple a high horsepower bass system to a wood floor and with careful gating one can measure the sound re-radiating from the floor. This is the tactile effect Chris mentioned. I recall in the 1980s Richard C. Heyser AES Fellow who helped pioneer time-delay spectrometry gated measurements of speakers in I believe the Audio magazine review of B&W 801 series 1 documented pre-echos from the floor. This because the speed of sound thru solid materials is considerably faster that thru air. So the woofer's reaction energy can race down the speaker box into the floor and reradiate closer to the listener or mic and thus beat the sound direct from driver via air transmission.
Hey Paul... what is the difference between bright and warm? Is it mainly the source? or the wires? or the speakers? or combination or all? Which is the more preferred type of sound as there are some who love FOCALs/KLIPSCH,etc but then we have some who love B&Ws/KEFs, etc
If I couple my speakers to the floor. The bass becomes bloated. And the sound becomes fuzzy. I have my speakers on isolation pads. And I also can feel the bass on the floor, even if they are isolated from the floor.
Tried soft cushions under my speakers. Not a way to go! Wierd spacey sound, no stability in soundscape, and a mushy bass. If you have a solid wooden floor, make use of it, just use them spikes.
Decoupling my speakers with rubber feet was the best value for money upgrade ever.
Yes but use 5 not 4 or one sheet open-cell cellulose foam 3" or big balls of blu tack is better than rubber
Try sorbothane
Try hockey pucks ;)
I used to have a subwoofer on sorbothane hemispheres and the cabinet would vibrate like crazy. Now spike-coupled to a concrete block, cabinet resonance reduced.
@@johnpoo1662 I would say it's more down to poor construction of the subwoofer you could always advise on any sub or speaker put a concrete 2-inch paving slab on top stop any movement and sharpen up the bass
This one deserved a part two,as did the speaker cable length vid.
Chris seems to be a nice person. Thank You for the video.
Paul was like: let's speed this up, only I get to ramble. Check please, lol love it
Caught that!
I think my 18" is coupled to my neighbpurs phone. Every time i listen to a movie i get a text that his house is shaking 😆
Invite him over
I have always been vexed by the difference between decoupling and spikes, even under components. They clearly sound different, but I can’t quite figure out which is better. I kind of lean towards decoupling just because it makes more sense to me, but who knows? One of life’s great mysteries.
From my FRF measurements as an engineer several years ago with floor vibration, speaker spikes did the inverse of what they claimed do do, they decrease transmissibility from the speaker to the floor through carpeting.
My room is 28×14 and upstairs above the kitchen/dining area. I use halved racquet balls under the sub feet and place them atop 4, 15lbs garden pavers. That made the most dramatic improvement to my room response thus far. Cleared the mud and tightened the low end
I grew up a old wood house in a time of albums. Coupling speakers to the floor meant that your albums sounded like crap. When you are a teen to 20's keeping the volume down was also not a option. It was so bad that we always recorded albums on cassette right out of the paper sleeve just to take the turntable out of the equation. I found out as a kid that if I picked my speakers up off the floor some and put a piece of carpet padding between the speaker and the thing it was sitting on mom didn't yell so much and it sounded better. It took about another minute to figure out that speaker placement on all axis's was more important then where they looked good. When I got a little older I moved to my first Slab house. Totally different world. Then the goal was just to stop the speakers from walking. All that came to a end the day I bought my first set if Infinity RS IIIa's. Four foot tall and weigh as much as a small car. No matter what surface you set and forget. On a wood decked floor with a hard surface attached to it today I may use some felt or something just so the two wood surfaces would not touch but that is about all. It's all about the box and what surface it sits on.
I have a wooden floor and the sound of my system improved greatly after installing , Townshend Podiums.⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Interesting comment about the energy being transferred directly in to the cabinet rather than only discussing sound waves that travel trough the air inside the cabinet. Chris clearly has deep knowledge about speaker design.
Really very intuitive and common sense.
@giri kotte well, this research is now about 40 years old and common knowledge. There’s a wealth of information and aes papers etc.
Also worth noting that the energy we so desperately try to absorb in the stuffing has a ready exit right through the speaker cone.
The problem with the cabinet resonnances is that they are NOT a part of the music. But rather artifact of trying to hold the moving elements in place. So by coupling that, you will give sounds to the floor that is NOT a part of the music. By isolating the speakers from the floor. The only sound that will come out in the room are those that come from the elements. And the vibration energy will be absorbed by the isolation material.
Coupling the box to the floor will effectively give the box more mass, which should reduce some of the resonances, but will also transfer some of the resonances into the floor. That's why Chris clarified that the material that makes up the floor matters so much. Also, lower frequencies are meant to be felt by the whole body, not just heard, so coupling the environment for LF can give a more visceral sense of the music. Ideally, speaker boxes have no resonance at all for most of the audible range.
@@ryanlangan1060 I feel the energy on the floor. The rel subwoofers which sends energy straight through the isolation pad and into the floor.
@@ryanlangan1060 I have wooden floor which is prone to vibrations.
Ideally you want;
1.) infinitely high mass baffle for the acoustic wave-launch
2.) zero energy transferred 𝘮𝘦𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 from the loudspeaker cabinet to the floor
Fly it !!!
Why?
The clever design of my Le Contour Stabile 160 floor standers (made by Lavardin), has a "base" for the speaker to sit on, made out of plywood and painted black. The differences between on/off is huge, and with the bases in place, the 3 spikes underneath the speaker, can then rest in these drilled holes for em'. It tightens everything up and now it's pretty easy to move these around for perfect set-up. Cheers from Denmark
Thanks, Chris! 🎶🔊🙂
Decoupling is better if you couple it to the floor the bass drops through the floor if you got turntables it's a real no no
Best to put your speakers on 3"+ cellulose foam covering the whole bottom of the speaker. With narrow floorstanders you probably want to to use double-sided sticky tape and attach it to the bottom and bit wider than the speaker. Covering your speaker as well helps with sound resonance smearing the sound use a natural cotton towel, big speakers a beach towel or bath towel
In another life Chris was a famous philosopher. (Just not sure which one.)
Great video. I HATE spikes. Brings the room in place big time.
Please if you could more videos and insight on this topic.
The problem with resonnances also is inversly proportional with weight. The cheapest speakers are lighter in weight, and hence vibrate more than more expensive speakers. So if you have a 100 pound plus speaker, the vibrations that comes down to the surface below is much less than with a light 30 to 40 pound cheap floorstander.
I have dual 12" subs with self-installed rubber wheels on a carpeted concrete floor. Main tower speakers are on spikes. Sounds fine to me.
Do the sub cabinets vibrate?
@@johnpoo1662 Yes, but not in a way to cause a sonic degradation. Having my 300lb mother-in-law sit on them doesn't affect the sound.
@@jamesplotkin4674 Now that's what i call a bass trap :D
Any material vibrating other than the speaker cones usually only add distortion and smears the details. Decoupling the speakers with foam or rubber feet can greatly help. Spikes are not making sense to me.
The spikes act as a physical diode, giving vibrations a one-way path away from the speakers.
That's why floor material and construction are important to that method.
Coupling speakers to tongue and groove over joists has the effect of driving the floor like a passive radiator, greatly tightening up the bass, as well as giving that tactile feel that some people love so well.
Roger Waters' bass on DSOTM will vibrate your spinal column!
@@HareDeLune How is a spike working as a physical diode? A spike made of metal that doesn't actually flex or allow the motion to decouple will transfer the same energy as any other thicker metal rod. If using spikes, you can avoid things to shift in the horizontal dimensions as the spike can dig into a soft surface like wood. And if you use spikes through a carpet, you are more directly coupled to the floor material compared to resting the speakers on the soft carpet.
Using the floor as a passive radiator is possibly adding to the total acoustical output as your energy transfer efficiency will increase but so will the total harmonic distortion. I've seen measurements of 30% THD from floor material getting involved. Typically such material also has serious unpredictable resonance issues making the overall frequency response very unpredictable and uneven. The same can easily happen when you install in-wall or in-ceiling speakers and your walls or ceiling act as a speaker cabinet.
Actually, I like the sound of electrostatics, planar, ribbon, and such transducers, and servo subwoofers for being loyal to the audio in the time domain and always aim at avoiding contributors like messy reflections and vibrating resonant surfaces that especially ruin the decay performance.
@@ThinkingBetter
I am not a Physics professor, or a Physical Engineer. I cannot explain to you technically how it works, but I can humbly point out that the evidence that it *does* work in the way I have described is in the vibrating floor, and in hearing cleaner, tighter bass.
I don't honestly know how much energy from vibrating floorboards exists in the audible spectrum, but my guess is very little, if any.
@@HareDeLune You made me curious about this "mechanical diode" claim. I like to understand how this is even possible and can find only some pseudoscience explanations specific for audio rather than actual science. I personally use some rubber pads under my subwoofers that help decoupling them quite nicely and they work in a completely understood way e.g. same way as decoupling your car's engine's vibrations through rubber motor mounts. It's great if you have a positive effect of using spikes. My guess is that theoretically, you should have a cleaner bass due to your speakers being held more firmly in place reducing forward/backward motions of the entire speaker at low bass frequencies.
@@ThinkingBetter
My woofer cabinets came with rubber feet, which I later replaced with some DIY spikes, as I was poor and also enjoy DIY.
Having the spikes in place instead of the rubber feet sounded much, much better to my ears. Also, placing a weight of approximately two pounds on top of each cabinet produced even more pleasing results.
While I like and appreciate science very much, I am not a scientist myself. I've always been more of an artist.
While my DIY experiments with my own system in my own home may seem quaint or rustic to you, they have meant much more enjoyment of my system and listening to music through it to me.
My system of measurement is careful and critical listening with my own ears.
While this may be fallible and subjective to a large degree, it also happens to be one and the same with how I enjoy music and using my system to that ultimate purpose.
Therefore, I have been quite satisfied so far with my own methods, crude as they may be.
A combination of Isoacoustic feet and Townsend seismic springs work great
With added weights on top
I found that placing inexpensive Herbies cone/spike pucks beneath my Vandy 2CE spikes removed the muddiness resulting in much cleaner bass. Well recorded tracks sound more dynamic with the caveat that poorly recorded tracks sound a bit thin because they cannot benefit from bass transmission through the floor.
Nice video, Paul. Thanks. Chris somewhat sufficiently addressed the question but obviously lacks experience with extreme versions of superior implemention from a vibration management perspective. Otherwise Chris would have been very clear about which strategy reigns far superior over the other. One key note. Mechanical energy has basic behaviors and these behaviors do not change between low frequencies and mid/high frequencies. Therefore, if a strategy or methodology is truly superior in one frequency range then it is superior for the entire frequency bandwidth. Where confusion sets in is when inferior designs, methods, materials, and/or implementations are employed and like most anything else when given only a token effort, the results are little more than minimal and a crapshoot at that. Please don't get me wrong. I like Chris. He has a very pleasant professional demeanor and he's obviously an expert of sorts with speaker design. Still that should not automatically imply that he is an expert at superior forms of vibration mgmt. Thanks for sharing.
Just because it's better to use rope instead of silly string to make a butterfly net doesn't mean that the handle to support the weight is strong enough. In this case silly string is best because the weight of the rope would snap the handle.
If the box isnt dense and rigid enough to absorb the woofer's energy he's saying it would be best to couple it (or the box will ring presumably)
Chris in my opinion was clearly encouraging you to audition and experiment with the alternative “solutions”. Try them and decide for yourself which makes the music sounds better and more enjoyable to you.
@@andrewjacob4185 Would you mind explaining how your response aligns with the title of this video?
@@ToadStool942 Sure. My response was really a comment in reply to your comment about the video. The video was discussing the best way to anchor a speaker. Toward the end of the video, Chris, having talked about “coupling” or “de coupling” speakers does not definitively say which is better or worse but rather suggests that the viewer (of the video in this case) is free and encouraged to experiment with both and make their own mind up as to which is better. I was in turn encouraging you to do the same. Whilst not everyone fully understands the physics surrounding this subject it’s great to experiment to work out what sounds better to the individual listener and this was in defence if Chris following your slight criticism of his content.
@@andrewjacob4185 Understood. What I was implying was that based on Chris' own words about coupling and decoupling methods, these are 2 diametrically opposed methods with very different results. The fact that Chris cannot determine which is the clearly superior method is in direct conflict with the video's title. Chris is a nice guy with areas of expertise but clearly superior means of vibration mgmt is not among them. That was my point.
In my experience most normal/limited range speakers sounds the best with spikes, so I'm thinking that full range speakers could sound the best with rubber feet since there's more energy
in the low frequencies. Like a subwoofer and how they usually sound better with rubber feet. Just a theory on my part.
I'm interested in the Colorist position. I have zero experience but I'm sure I could get the hang of it after ruining several women's hair.
It depends on the speaker and the floor. In general, though, when you get the amount of deflection and rate right with sorbothane it will do wonderous things.
I think isolation is the way to go. Personally I use industrial springs to decouple the speakers.
You will be surprised how much a speaker interacts with the room, especially in the UK with small rooms, concrete floors and solid walls.
Using the springs, has reduced any room boom and has made the bass sound a lot more rhythmic. The speaker also sounds a lot more detailed, because the tiny vibrations in the structure are not making their way to the speaker cone, which moves fractions of a millimeter.
I have a wooden suspension floor, and my speakers weigh well over 100lbs.
You can feel the floor wave when they are coupled.
The most Aaron Burr response ever.
I too prefer to couple to the floor because of the increased tactile effect on the bass and midrange.
Thanks for the information and knowledge Paul and Chris . You play in band Chris you playing the bass in a recent UA-cam video was awesome.
Thanks Dave! I met Jessica Carson through Octave Records at PS Audio.
Thanks Chris hopefully Axpona will happen next year I'd want to check PS audio speakers.
Paul, don’t shut Chris down while he’s still ticking! Sounds like we could’ve got a couple more minutes (at least) out of him on this interesting topic.
I'm pretty sure Newton's Third Law of Motion hasn't been repealed yet.
I have a few USS Ronald Regen Anchors in my back yard, and so far, no difference on indoor sound quality.
Is that the MX silo version?
@@BlankBrain The silo was a secret, thanks a lot!
Sounds fanatical.
@Fat Rat I’m a meat a potatoes rocker. Like
ac/dc from Back in Black onwards.
I really don’t care for stuffing in my boxes. And as long as the speakers don’t crawl across the floor, I’m good. Maybe when I get older and all growed up, I will start listening to violin music more and start discernment of the tonal qualities.
@Fat Rat I can’t recall not one iron butterfly tune. I been thunderstruck by my own design. Sheer luck driven by determination. That probably don’t make sense but the ends justifies the means. It’s a long way to the top of you want to rock n roll.
@Fat Rat never heard that song on the radio at all in the late 70’s on Detroit radio. There’s got to be a reason why some cities do and some don’t. Like AC/DC was not played in Detroit in the 70’s but Ted Nugent was. It’s...A...Conspiracy!
Great conversation guys. Theory is fine but experimentation with speaker placement is fun and costs nothing...
I think several 15’s nearing 120db is fun with ear plugs in and at 3 feet or less. I really don’t need soundstage so much, therefore I don’t think Paul’s speaker is gonna cut it for me.
@Fat Rat well, it is and it isn’t. I’m playing with a nad pre and a power amp at the mo. Plus a moving coil and it’s another world...
@Fat Rat oh, I’ve still got Luxi - as you say nothing lasts forever and I may need her up the track one day 🇦🇺 and yes enjoy the music!. Fast forward a decade and a half and that’s where you’ll find me lol...
@Fat Rat back at ya. Did you know that we’re Covid free this past month in my state and only 6 cases in the last seven days nationally. Amazing effort by the whole country! Be well . Be safe...
Don't (reputable) speaker manufacturers consider the natural cabinet resonance when voicing/tuning their design? In that case, won't rigidly coupling the enclosure with spikes change the "signature" sound? Or is signature sound just a marketing term for "at this price point everything's a compromise" :p
Definitely a matter of taste as well as being a 'no wrong or right way to do it' scenario. In my case, my stand mount speakers are coupled to my very solid, sand-filled, 100 lb steel stands with multiple points of blu tack. The stand then has spiked feet and is decoupled from the concrete basement floor it sits on. Regarding that blu tack, I have done a lot of experimentation with this and contrary to the common directive of putting four pea-sized points of tack in each corner under the speaker I have found that using a couple dozen pea-sized pieces of blu tack under the speaker coupling it to the stand actually results in a better transfer of resonances to the stand and getting a tighter, quicker bass, cleaner sound, with more apparent detail throughout.
@Fat Rat I'm with ya. I also do a little larger dot than a pea size myself as well, buddy!
Interesting. Right now I have Wharfedale EVO 4.2's on sand filled heavy stands sitting on carpeted wood flooring. Small poly pads between speaker and stands. I'm wondering if putting spikes under the stands might be beneficial. System sounds pretty good as is.
@Fat Rat I actually use the Ikea bamboo cutting boards for isolating my mono-blocks and Preamp. They are pretty popular with audiophiles in the US. A lot of vinyl guys use them for TT's too. Interesting use for speakers, I could see where that would be effective.
I got opposing woofers and it cancels all the vibrations.
@Fat Rat it's ok, we can't all be equal.
Fat Rat they are same exact woofer model indeed.
Superglue? Actually, my Klipsch Mirage OM-9 towers are 75ish pounds so are stuck.
A variable in this topic is floor type, in USA the options are typically suspended wood floor or concert slab. Couple a high horsepower bass system to a wood floor and with careful gating one can measure the sound re-radiating from the floor. This is the tactile effect Chris mentioned. I recall in the 1980s Richard C. Heyser AES Fellow who helped pioneer time-delay spectrometry gated measurements of speakers in I believe the Audio magazine review of B&W 801 series 1 documented pre-echos from the floor. This because the speed of sound thru solid materials is considerably faster that thru air. So the woofer's reaction energy can race down the speaker box into the floor and reradiate closer to the listener or mic and thus beat the sound direct from driver via air transmission.
Hey Paul... what is the difference between bright and warm? Is it mainly the source? or the wires? or the speakers? or combination or all? Which is the more preferred type of sound as there are some who love FOCALs/KLIPSCH,etc but then we have some who love B&Ws/KEFs, etc
Best way is to Buy and sell and test for yourself. No one has your ears either. Cheers.
Huh. I'm not sure what I learned here.... I guess trial and error? What sounds best to you?
Agree, no answer was given. But yeah, use spikes. Trust me, and trust your ears. Try it and just compare the speed of the bass.
If I couple my speakers to the floor. The bass becomes bloated. And the sound becomes fuzzy. I have my speakers on isolation pads. And I also can feel the bass on the floor, even if they are isolated from the floor.
Tried soft cushions under my speakers. Not a way to go! Wierd spacey sound, no stability in soundscape, and a mushy bass. If you have a solid wooden floor, make use of it, just use them spikes.
But you are using the floor as essentially a sounding board. That doesn’t really have a lot to do with hi-fi.
Decoupling for me with pmc's
It's my first video on UA-cam where first like belong to me 👌
Meh
So: no strongly held opinions here.
That's good?
Except when you have a speaker to design and produce....
Whelp, let's go out for lunch ;-)
I'm sorry but what was the "deliverable" for us in this conversation? I'm just hearing blah blah blah.....
Sounds like you might have a problem with your brain and it’s ability to accurately perceive input.
Speak speak but do not saids nothing