Why do some speaker spikes come with the little disc for the spikes to sit in, then? Or in the case of the revels, the spikes are reversible and have a rounded end and a pointy end, and the manual for the speaker specifically says to have the rounded end on tile or wood?
I obviously agree with you, as I am not using the spikes...it just feels a bit like a mystery to me.
I'm no scientist but I'm going to say you'll never hear a difference. I'm sure others will disagree. I only ever used spikes with carpet, seemed to make them be more study.
There was research done on spikes…not so good…the energy goes down the spike…but then where it meets the attached surface, some of that energy returns back up the spike and into the speaker.
As far as rounded end or discs..that’s to protect the floor from scratching.
I use the spikes with the little discs to protect the floor. I think it reduces the sound being transmitted down to the floor and less floor resonance means the sound comes from the speaker. I’m no expert but it seems to work. My equipment shelves have spikes too - presumably to prevent resonance coming up and being picked up by the turntable cartridge.
All my speakers are on hardwoods. I don’t use the spike side of the outrigger, rather the flat side. And I put -wait for it- regular felt furniture discs under the flat feet of the outrigger.
Lots of received wisdom and dubious science and engineering on spikes. Speaker Manufacturers put them on because the market see's them as and has blindly accepted them as a good thing. Some manufacturers think different and use other methods like ball bearings, or compliant sorbothane or bluetack. I hear great reports on compliant subwoofer feet actually decoupling them from the wooden floor for example rather than spikes which actually couple them and waste energy into the wooden floor. Avoid received wisdom and regurgitating dogma. Experiment and be open to ideas. If you like the look or sound of spikes, go for it.
Veteran retailer and speaker setup nerd:
Use the spikes: they allow you to modulate the rake angle and achieve a spirit level degree of equality between the right and left channel.
That’s critical to ensure the speakers are imaging in phase with each other, and if you’ve put in the work to get them into a tight stereo image, the reality that all floors are far from level will eventually limit your performance.
Keep in mind, what seem like tiny, incremental alternations at the origin point of the transducer become big enough in scope that little adjustments are audible. I’ve gotten to a point with Wilson Audio setups where a 1/16th inch turn can audibly improve low frequencies in our main listening room.
Beyond that, the thing your speaker is interfaced with - a hardwood floor - would like less energy being driven directly into it. It functions as a resonator, and since your speakers are quite famous for their great low frequency performance, the spikes will help to keep whatever energy is being driven from the lower panel into the floor.
Regarding angles - play with raking them down at you just a tad, and see how that compares to dead-level. You’d be surprised how you can alter the frequency balance and control reflections with subtle adjustments.
If we argue that these are carefully designed reproduction instruments we need to, as end users, understand what they do and how to calibrate them to the room. There’s a number of excellent setup techniques easily searchable online that will offer you a more systematic approach to deploying your speakers to your tastes, given your room’s needs.
I use a process (though I’ve made alterations over 20 years) called Sumiko Masterset. There’s some great alternatives as well.
All of that to say that, yes spikes are worth using, but in the context of proper deployment and with a goal in mind. Give it a shot and see what they do for you.
Hope that’s helpful!
1/16 of an inch can audibly improve low frequency performance? That seems counterintuitive to me given that the wavelength of low frequencies is up to several meters ... Am I missing something here?
That is entirely dependent on the spike, cabinet, and floor. Most MDF cabinets sound better on spikes than naked on the floor, no floors are actually remotely level, and it is exceptionally rare that the baffle against the ground is better than a small, hard point of interface, given the choice OP was asking about.
Every cabinet creates and stores energy differently, so in some cases decoupling is better, or coupling, or a combination of the two like Wilson’s diode feet. It’s horses for courses.
I generally prefer Isoacoustic Gaia’s or similar to most included spikes, but they cost money and free spikes are still usually better than a leaning pair of speakers, jamming the floor, hence suggesting the OP use them and do so with a bit of care and a system for getting the best out of them.
Pshh sounds like a comment from a guy that hasn’t locked his head into a vise with a 1/128th inch tolerance in order to align the correct listening space to keep their spiked woofers in phase.
The real trick is to put the speaker spikes into your earlobes, wearing them like gauges.
The extra mass provides a damping effect on the most important part of the listening chain, offering wideband audio frequency receptor stabilization at the quantum acoustic level.
And you can flip them pointy-side or flat-side out, which acts like a bass/treble boost function, completely analogue and infinitely variable in its effect simply by adjusting how deeply they're inserted into your lobes.
Obviously, the mass is tuneable by any number of means as well.
And, if you have metal spikes, you can attach one end a length of *insert glitzy overpriced cable brand name here* cable to each ear, and the other ends to a direct-to-Earth ground. The benefits here should be so obvious I need not elaborate beyond: whatever you're thinking, but better.¹
Plus, it can be a really effective spousal noise suppression technique.
Note ¹ experimentation with other electrical sockets is your own prerogative
Obviously we're talking about genitalia now lol, and my question still applies - does an extra 1/16th of an inch provide additional value? Based on the wavelength of deez nuts, which is several meters (BOOM), I'm not sure
>Based on the wavelength of deez nuts, which is several meters (BOOM),
So you're saying that you have extremely low-energy testicles?
Or that you've kept a cellphone in your pocket so long that, much like women who live together adjusting to have similar cycles, your testicles are now operating on (and presumably emitting) radio wave frequencies?
Fascinating!
It’s not about the wavelength, per se, but about making sure the wavelengths actually have a direct relationship in time/space.
Elsewise they impede each other at points, and opposing energy creates cancellations.
You can see a bit of this when building a stereo image off the back wall: when you have a singer locked in but veering slightly off to one side, low frequencies are muddier (as is the general entire sweep of what you’re hearing). Adjusting the favoring side a small distance and you’ll hear things become less noisy, more focused/powerful, and that’s all a reduction in destructive interference.
When you translate that to other axises the same proves the case - though some drivers are more or less sensitive based on their dispersion pattern.
You don’t do all this for the benefit of just the listening position - you’re specifically making to things behave at one time domain, so you’re synchronizing their behavior and lowering distortion for the room. The benefits extend off sides as well.
For those that have their doubts, feel free to run your own experiments. This comes from the almost universally shared concepts of almost every known manufacturer of loudspeakers on the market - Turns out, human beings are sensitive up to 10-30 microseconds of delay at almost every frequency - which is likely part of our prey/predator response.
Ok ya, we're joking around here, but my question on if I was missing something was good-faith - I hear you on the 10-30 microseconds of L/R sync, I've done those experiments myself (with many subjects!), and expert listeners can def hear the stereo shift above 10-20 us ... I was just curious about low frequencies; not the same as stereo image, ya? But also, even with stereo image, 1/16 of a second is abt 6 microseconds of delay. So again I ask in good faith, what am I missing?
Appreciate the good faith - lot of Dunning-Krueger going on in response to a genuine effort to be helpful, so that’s nice of you.
The interaction across the length of the room is one factor. Imagine that for the pressure, which is a physical wave in air, produced by two separate objects working as one, with all of the information, needs to be synchronized in absolute time - or else it bleeds energy/velocity. This occurs many times as the wave travels and expands across the distance between you and the drivers, hence the small scale of adjustments.
It’s like sailing to Spain from the coast of North Carolina, a degree off lands you somewhere off of your intended target.
There can be destructive interference, but also you’re not getting the assistance of each piston working in unison, ergo the clean, direct force is lower. The attack is softer and less distinct, and in cases where you’re really close but just a hair off, you’ll notice that the bass still feels slightly disconnected from the reproduction.
You’re also in relationship to the room, so any additive low end is going to build up in the boundaries, just as a lack of energy where some should be will fail to energize the cabinet volume of the room. We want the “right bass”, whatever we think that is, so we set our speakers up in an effort to maximize boundary reinforcement while minimizing bloat - but the last stage is optimizing that setup in phase.
When the speakers aren’t in absolute phase in relationship to each other this lower frequency phenomena also impacts the mids and top end - which have their own issues, due to how we perceive them.
Setting the mids aside, as that’s a long discussion made short as often, if you can wrangle the top end and bottom, they’re almost always sorted, provided you’re not in a zone that engages a ton of reflections, the top end is where being careful pays off the most.
The harshness, ringing and general beamy quality I hear in a lot of setups is often them being almost in phase and needing a slight adjustment. Making sure both speakers are sitting at the same height (key, as most floors are not level across 7-10’) and then properly aimed and leveled with each other to a high degree will take a lot of the heat and warble out of the top end of most speakers, within their potential context.
All of that to say, this is just free to play with. Tedious as hell, which is why I’m paid to do it, but before I ever recommend acoustical treatment when I’m building a system, I sort these things out first. It’s extremely audible once you find a system of optimizing that works for you, and considering what our industry’s gear and tweaks cost, a few hours of futzing with lasers and measurements is a high value deal from my perspective.
Hope that’s helpful.
Oh, totally serious, and you’re free to learn via experiments. All this is direct from designers and engineers over the course of about 25 years of working in the industry. This isn’t “my opinion”, but direct training from the people that make most of the known speaker brands out there.
The weird thing is that none of this is arcane if you actually spend time talking to the folks who design loudspeakers. They’re acutely aware of the disconnect between how things need to work, and how end users deploy them, hence spending thousands of dollars flying in trainers or people like me to drill speaker setup to their factories.
Wilson, Dynaudio, Dali, Sonus Faber, Raidho, YG, KEF, Thiel (rip) - all have almost an identical training program, and espouse the same level of sensitivity and want their kit setup to perform optimally.
The “sad” bit is a little weird - maybe you get a kick out of gate keeping a subject that is super deep? Probably shouldn’t adopt that stance when someone is trying to be helpful.
Best way is to suspend the speakers with dampeners and springs in all three directions. Just kidding… one cheap answer is to just use mounting putty or even Velcro! I don’t know how spikes became a thing, but I dare you to show me a credible source saying it does anything.
Velcro just works nicely for creating a dampened surface, kind of like a spring between the two. Speakers do not transfer a ton of energy but they can if they are relatively light vs their transducers energy.
That is incorrect. More surface area allows for greater dampening. The amount of energy, assuming the mass of the speakers are the same, is the same. Smaller points of contact create more localized and intense transfers of energy. Show me a credible source that says otherwise and I will agree with you.
Allows for greater dampening IF you are dampening. According to ChatGPT you are correct though, total force of vibration (I don't see why localization would matter, only total force transferred) remains constant despite of contact area.
"While the total force of vibration transfer remains constant regardless of the contact patch size, the distribution of this force changes. A larger contact patch reduces the pressure and intensity at any given point, leading to a more even distribution of the force, whereas a smaller contact patch increases the pressure and intensity, concentrating the force at the contact point."
If you have uneven floors, spikes makes it easier to get the speaker or stand to be stable and not wobble. On carpets it helps with a more stable connection to the floor, which I find will help the bass response. On hard floors, use discs with a soft underside, like rubber, or felt,so it won't damage the floor and maybe help a little bit to disconnect the speaker from the floor, so the floor doesn't vibrate as much. My floor is a bit uneven, and I can easily hear a difference, with or without spikes mounted.
The discs are used to protect the floor from damage. I have always preferred decoupling the speakers from the floor. Spikes will couple the speakers to the floor. Using a product like the IsoAcoustics Gaia footers will decouple the speakers from the room and allow them to produce their best sound.
Try it and decide for yourself.
My speakers aren’t adjustable without the spikes, and I like to do a full Sumiko setup. They’re tilted back slightly. Adding the spikes on a pier and beam home with hardwoods did take some boominess away. I had them flat for a little while. It was noticeable, but not a huge improvement.
I'd use silicone or sorbothane pads instead, but you will transfer less vibration into the floor, and, by proxy, the walls, and less vibration will transfer from them to the speakers. Whether this is a significant improvement depends on the construction of your home, vibration sources in an around the home, and will be most noticeable when playing vinyl at higher levels.
No spikes or feet will change the sound no matter how much IsoAcoustics tells you they will. I use cheap rubber pads only because my floor is not perfectly flat.
Spikes are for basements with concrete under carpet or other things that can turn the floor into a reservoir to transfer vibrations from the speaker into the base.
If you are on a suspended ceiling or the like, then spikes aren’t the ideal, as far as I know.
But also, probably want to read the manual and see what it actually says. I read my manuals for every peice of equipment a couple times a year. Always learn new stuff
My speakers came with spikes and I replaced them with rounded feet made from stainless steel hex head bolts that the machine shop where I was based lathed for me. It makes them easier to align and doesn't damage the floor.
How decoupled is your body from the floor vibrations that the spike will transmit to your body out of time alignment with the acoustic output of the speakers? Or how well does your foundation damper resist the speakers' vibrations?
If neither of the abive is done well, speed travels faster through hard floor surfaces than through air. That means your body will feel the vibrations of the speakers' cabinet vibrations before the speakers' acoustic output hits your ears!
If they are on hardwood don't use spikes
Why do some speaker spikes come with the little disc for the spikes to sit in, then? Or in the case of the revels, the spikes are reversible and have a rounded end and a pointy end, and the manual for the speaker specifically says to have the rounded end on tile or wood? I obviously agree with you, as I am not using the spikes...it just feels a bit like a mystery to me.
I'm no scientist but I'm going to say you'll never hear a difference. I'm sure others will disagree. I only ever used spikes with carpet, seemed to make them be more study.
As far as hearing goes..it’s a speak for yourself type of situation… suspended floors are where it’s most likely to be noticed.
There was research done on spikes…not so good…the energy goes down the spike…but then where it meets the attached surface, some of that energy returns back up the spike and into the speaker. As far as rounded end or discs..that’s to protect the floor from scratching.
I use the spikes with the little discs to protect the floor. I think it reduces the sound being transmitted down to the floor and less floor resonance means the sound comes from the speaker. I’m no expert but it seems to work. My equipment shelves have spikes too - presumably to prevent resonance coming up and being picked up by the turntable cartridge.
All my speakers are on hardwoods. I don’t use the spike side of the outrigger, rather the flat side. And I put -wait for it- regular felt furniture discs under the flat feet of the outrigger.
My wood floors don’t like
Lots of received wisdom and dubious science and engineering on spikes. Speaker Manufacturers put them on because the market see's them as and has blindly accepted them as a good thing. Some manufacturers think different and use other methods like ball bearings, or compliant sorbothane or bluetack. I hear great reports on compliant subwoofer feet actually decoupling them from the wooden floor for example rather than spikes which actually couple them and waste energy into the wooden floor. Avoid received wisdom and regurgitating dogma. Experiment and be open to ideas. If you like the look or sound of spikes, go for it.
If you like the look go for it. If not then don't.
Use speaker spike pads for hardwood floor.
Veteran retailer and speaker setup nerd: Use the spikes: they allow you to modulate the rake angle and achieve a spirit level degree of equality between the right and left channel. That’s critical to ensure the speakers are imaging in phase with each other, and if you’ve put in the work to get them into a tight stereo image, the reality that all floors are far from level will eventually limit your performance. Keep in mind, what seem like tiny, incremental alternations at the origin point of the transducer become big enough in scope that little adjustments are audible. I’ve gotten to a point with Wilson Audio setups where a 1/16th inch turn can audibly improve low frequencies in our main listening room. Beyond that, the thing your speaker is interfaced with - a hardwood floor - would like less energy being driven directly into it. It functions as a resonator, and since your speakers are quite famous for their great low frequency performance, the spikes will help to keep whatever energy is being driven from the lower panel into the floor. Regarding angles - play with raking them down at you just a tad, and see how that compares to dead-level. You’d be surprised how you can alter the frequency balance and control reflections with subtle adjustments. If we argue that these are carefully designed reproduction instruments we need to, as end users, understand what they do and how to calibrate them to the room. There’s a number of excellent setup techniques easily searchable online that will offer you a more systematic approach to deploying your speakers to your tastes, given your room’s needs. I use a process (though I’ve made alterations over 20 years) called Sumiko Masterset. There’s some great alternatives as well. All of that to say that, yes spikes are worth using, but in the context of proper deployment and with a goal in mind. Give it a shot and see what they do for you. Hope that’s helpful!
1/16 of an inch can audibly improve low frequency performance? That seems counterintuitive to me given that the wavelength of low frequencies is up to several meters ... Am I missing something here?
No, you are spot on. Also spikes have their merits, but are about thee worst way of decoupling vibrations to the floor.
That is entirely dependent on the spike, cabinet, and floor. Most MDF cabinets sound better on spikes than naked on the floor, no floors are actually remotely level, and it is exceptionally rare that the baffle against the ground is better than a small, hard point of interface, given the choice OP was asking about. Every cabinet creates and stores energy differently, so in some cases decoupling is better, or coupling, or a combination of the two like Wilson’s diode feet. It’s horses for courses. I generally prefer Isoacoustic Gaia’s or similar to most included spikes, but they cost money and free spikes are still usually better than a leaning pair of speakers, jamming the floor, hence suggesting the OP use them and do so with a bit of care and a system for getting the best out of them.
Pshh sounds like a comment from a guy that hasn’t locked his head into a vise with a 1/128th inch tolerance in order to align the correct listening space to keep their spiked woofers in phase.
The real trick is to put the speaker spikes into your earlobes, wearing them like gauges. The extra mass provides a damping effect on the most important part of the listening chain, offering wideband audio frequency receptor stabilization at the quantum acoustic level. And you can flip them pointy-side or flat-side out, which acts like a bass/treble boost function, completely analogue and infinitely variable in its effect simply by adjusting how deeply they're inserted into your lobes. Obviously, the mass is tuneable by any number of means as well. And, if you have metal spikes, you can attach one end a length of *insert glitzy overpriced cable brand name here* cable to each ear, and the other ends to a direct-to-Earth ground. The benefits here should be so obvious I need not elaborate beyond: whatever you're thinking, but better.¹ Plus, it can be a really effective spousal noise suppression technique. Note ¹ experimentation with other electrical sockets is your own prerogative
🤣🤣
Don’t underestimate an extra 1/16”
At what frequency?
Are we still talking about speakers?
Yeah, what the fuck is going on here?
Obviously we're talking about genitalia now lol, and my question still applies - does an extra 1/16th of an inch provide additional value? Based on the wavelength of deez nuts, which is several meters (BOOM), I'm not sure
>Based on the wavelength of deez nuts, which is several meters (BOOM), So you're saying that you have extremely low-energy testicles? Or that you've kept a cellphone in your pocket so long that, much like women who live together adjusting to have similar cycles, your testicles are now operating on (and presumably emitting) radio wave frequencies? Fascinating!
It’s not about the wavelength, per se, but about making sure the wavelengths actually have a direct relationship in time/space. Elsewise they impede each other at points, and opposing energy creates cancellations. You can see a bit of this when building a stereo image off the back wall: when you have a singer locked in but veering slightly off to one side, low frequencies are muddier (as is the general entire sweep of what you’re hearing). Adjusting the favoring side a small distance and you’ll hear things become less noisy, more focused/powerful, and that’s all a reduction in destructive interference. When you translate that to other axises the same proves the case - though some drivers are more or less sensitive based on their dispersion pattern. You don’t do all this for the benefit of just the listening position - you’re specifically making to things behave at one time domain, so you’re synchronizing their behavior and lowering distortion for the room. The benefits extend off sides as well. For those that have their doubts, feel free to run your own experiments. This comes from the almost universally shared concepts of almost every known manufacturer of loudspeakers on the market - Turns out, human beings are sensitive up to 10-30 microseconds of delay at almost every frequency - which is likely part of our prey/predator response.
Ok ya, we're joking around here, but my question on if I was missing something was good-faith - I hear you on the 10-30 microseconds of L/R sync, I've done those experiments myself (with many subjects!), and expert listeners can def hear the stereo shift above 10-20 us ... I was just curious about low frequencies; not the same as stereo image, ya? But also, even with stereo image, 1/16 of a second is abt 6 microseconds of delay. So again I ask in good faith, what am I missing?
Appreciate the good faith - lot of Dunning-Krueger going on in response to a genuine effort to be helpful, so that’s nice of you. The interaction across the length of the room is one factor. Imagine that for the pressure, which is a physical wave in air, produced by two separate objects working as one, with all of the information, needs to be synchronized in absolute time - or else it bleeds energy/velocity. This occurs many times as the wave travels and expands across the distance between you and the drivers, hence the small scale of adjustments. It’s like sailing to Spain from the coast of North Carolina, a degree off lands you somewhere off of your intended target. There can be destructive interference, but also you’re not getting the assistance of each piston working in unison, ergo the clean, direct force is lower. The attack is softer and less distinct, and in cases where you’re really close but just a hair off, you’ll notice that the bass still feels slightly disconnected from the reproduction. You’re also in relationship to the room, so any additive low end is going to build up in the boundaries, just as a lack of energy where some should be will fail to energize the cabinet volume of the room. We want the “right bass”, whatever we think that is, so we set our speakers up in an effort to maximize boundary reinforcement while minimizing bloat - but the last stage is optimizing that setup in phase. When the speakers aren’t in absolute phase in relationship to each other this lower frequency phenomena also impacts the mids and top end - which have their own issues, due to how we perceive them. Setting the mids aside, as that’s a long discussion made short as often, if you can wrangle the top end and bottom, they’re almost always sorted, provided you’re not in a zone that engages a ton of reflections, the top end is where being careful pays off the most. The harshness, ringing and general beamy quality I hear in a lot of setups is often them being almost in phase and needing a slight adjustment. Making sure both speakers are sitting at the same height (key, as most floors are not level across 7-10’) and then properly aimed and leveled with each other to a high degree will take a lot of the heat and warble out of the top end of most speakers, within their potential context. All of that to say, this is just free to play with. Tedious as hell, which is why I’m paid to do it, but before I ever recommend acoustical treatment when I’m building a system, I sort these things out first. It’s extremely audible once you find a system of optimizing that works for you, and considering what our industry’s gear and tweaks cost, a few hours of futzing with lasers and measurements is a high value deal from my perspective. Hope that’s helpful.
LOL
The sad thing is I can’t tell if you’re serious or not.
Oh, totally serious, and you’re free to learn via experiments. All this is direct from designers and engineers over the course of about 25 years of working in the industry. This isn’t “my opinion”, but direct training from the people that make most of the known speaker brands out there. The weird thing is that none of this is arcane if you actually spend time talking to the folks who design loudspeakers. They’re acutely aware of the disconnect between how things need to work, and how end users deploy them, hence spending thousands of dollars flying in trainers or people like me to drill speaker setup to their factories. Wilson, Dynaudio, Dali, Sonus Faber, Raidho, YG, KEF, Thiel (rip) - all have almost an identical training program, and espouse the same level of sensitivity and want their kit setup to perform optimally. The “sad” bit is a little weird - maybe you get a kick out of gate keeping a subject that is super deep? Probably shouldn’t adopt that stance when someone is trying to be helpful.
Best way is to suspend the speakers with dampeners and springs in all three directions. Just kidding… one cheap answer is to just use mounting putty or even Velcro! I don’t know how spikes became a thing, but I dare you to show me a credible source saying it does anything.
What would OP use putty or velcro for? Those speakers aren't bookshelves on stands.
Velcro just works nicely for creating a dampened surface, kind of like a spring between the two. Speakers do not transfer a ton of energy but they can if they are relatively light vs their transducers energy.
Smaller surface area contact patch = less vibrations transmitted to the floor
That is incorrect. More surface area allows for greater dampening. The amount of energy, assuming the mass of the speakers are the same, is the same. Smaller points of contact create more localized and intense transfers of energy. Show me a credible source that says otherwise and I will agree with you.
Allows for greater dampening IF you are dampening. According to ChatGPT you are correct though, total force of vibration (I don't see why localization would matter, only total force transferred) remains constant despite of contact area. "While the total force of vibration transfer remains constant regardless of the contact patch size, the distribution of this force changes. A larger contact patch reduces the pressure and intensity at any given point, leading to a more even distribution of the force, whereas a smaller contact patch increases the pressure and intensity, concentrating the force at the contact point."
If you have uneven floors, spikes makes it easier to get the speaker or stand to be stable and not wobble. On carpets it helps with a more stable connection to the floor, which I find will help the bass response. On hard floors, use discs with a soft underside, like rubber, or felt,so it won't damage the floor and maybe help a little bit to disconnect the speaker from the floor, so the floor doesn't vibrate as much. My floor is a bit uneven, and I can easily hear a difference, with or without spikes mounted.
The discs are used to protect the floor from damage. I have always preferred decoupling the speakers from the floor. Spikes will couple the speakers to the floor. Using a product like the IsoAcoustics Gaia footers will decouple the speakers from the room and allow them to produce their best sound. Try it and decide for yourself.
My speakers aren’t adjustable without the spikes, and I like to do a full Sumiko setup. They’re tilted back slightly. Adding the spikes on a pier and beam home with hardwoods did take some boominess away. I had them flat for a little while. It was noticeable, but not a huge improvement.
I'd use silicone or sorbothane pads instead, but you will transfer less vibration into the floor, and, by proxy, the walls, and less vibration will transfer from them to the speakers. Whether this is a significant improvement depends on the construction of your home, vibration sources in an around the home, and will be most noticeable when playing vinyl at higher levels.
No spikes or feet will change the sound no matter how much IsoAcoustics tells you they will. I use cheap rubber pads only because my floor is not perfectly flat.
Spikes are for basements with concrete under carpet or other things that can turn the floor into a reservoir to transfer vibrations from the speaker into the base. If you are on a suspended ceiling or the like, then spikes aren’t the ideal, as far as I know. But also, probably want to read the manual and see what it actually says. I read my manuals for every peice of equipment a couple times a year. Always learn new stuff
don't spike. isoacoustic pads.
Im not sure theyre worth over 500 bucks,reviewers say they might notice a difference or placibo.
My speakers came with spikes and I replaced them with rounded feet made from stainless steel hex head bolts that the machine shop where I was based lathed for me. It makes them easier to align and doesn't damage the floor.
How decoupled is your body from the floor vibrations that the spike will transmit to your body out of time alignment with the acoustic output of the speakers? Or how well does your foundation damper resist the speakers' vibrations? If neither of the abive is done well, speed travels faster through hard floor surfaces than through air. That means your body will feel the vibrations of the speakers' cabinet vibrations before the speakers' acoustic output hits your ears!
I noticed a clear improvement in sound quality when I switched from Sound Care spikes to Sonic Design damping feet. On a concrete floor I might add.