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In Reply to: RE: "New" Quads and Stands posted by josh358 on March 02, 2017 at 07:37:03
I'm in the UK and have found this supplier of sound / vibration absorbing pads, strips and sheets. I'll be asking for samples before choosing some that I'll stick permanently to the underside of thick slate slabs. The speakers will be spiked to the slabs (or even bolts directly) to increase the mass of the cabinets and the pad below will eradicate vibration transfer between floor and speaker and vice versa and allow easy re-positioning of the speakers. What can be better or more effective? And at a fraction the price that the audio industry wants from me! Peter
PS Sorbothane also offers numerous industrial products, no doubt at a fraction the price that the audio people charge for adding a "audio" tag to!
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Just make sure that you get the resonance frequency and damping right. Remember that we're dealing with a fairly massive item and low frequencies here, you can't just stick something springy under a slab and expect to get the results you want. I think you'll probably have good luck with products sold for pro audio, since they generally have full specification and are designed for this purpose. Or you could go with a product designed for consumer audio, but the markup will probably be higher than it will be for the pro audio stuff.
Thanks. I'll speak with the guys at Quad next week to see if they can offer opinions on whether a slate slab fixed to the underside of the speaker's base plate is good, or if it's better to keep the spikes and place a "loose" slate slab under the spikes. I don't want to add to the height of the Quads though. They're already sounding good after very little time spent adjusting angles, etc. Peter
I found a good compromise for Vandersteens using bluetack and solid core cinder blocks as bases. That was more effective than spikes on vanderstands and spikes on cinderblock. The speaker was vibrating an order of magnetude less when cushioned with 5 balls of blue tack per speaker between the speaker and cinderblocks. the floor was wood.
Yes, isn't it interesting that stand-mount speakers have always used Blutak to secure them to the top of the stand, but the stand itself is traditionally spiked to the floor. With floor-standing speakers, the trend seems to be away from spikes into the floor to more of an isolation method.I'm far from convinced that any of these practices have any over-riding advantage (as otherwise there would be no further discussion) and that what works best after trials of particular speakers on particular floors seems to be far preferable than doing what others say we should do - or spending daft sums of money on what they want us to believe will make a massive difference to the sound!
I think I'll get some thick slate slabs cut to fit the underside of the cabinets and have holes drilled so they can be bolted directly to the speakers (adding 50% to their mass) but also testing using Bluetak between the speaker and slab. I would choose slate over any other stone as it is very dense and has less "ring" than marble or even granite. Peter
Edits: 03/03/17
Agree about slate, just that it is flaky to deal with. I bought a couple of packs of cut slate tiles that I selected for lack of ringing when tapped by a small steel rod for damping purposes.
Spiking is a better method of transferring energy to the slate because of the high pressure contact at the spike. Bolting slate to anything is a difficult proposition and it will fall apart that way, just crumble around the bolt due to the high vibration energy. It has a layered structure and you want to transmit energy to the top layer and have it absorbed into the structure rather than transmit to the structure via the bolt, or the area under the nut that has been weakened by drilling the hole for the bolt.
As Josh suggests, the issue is that each location type requires different strategies. Each type of floor and support structure requires its own particular solution.
Absorption with pliant materials is a good damping method if you can fix one side to a stationary mass. Otherwise it is just another mass being vibrated. It will reduce vibration but not nearly as much as when it is used as a constrained layer in the support. An example of this is with a friend's planar box speaker that had a lively cabinet even after applying gobs of soundcoat damping. The solution we came up with was to build an external box for 3 sides of the speaker and the bottom made of corian and fill the spaces between the boxes with a compliant setting material (bitumen based).. Deadened the bass section. The top section was left on its own to avoid diffraction near the tweeter, so had a bolt run through it with neoprene under the nuts. Now it is amazing.
That's an interesting question. I suspect that the spikes would be superfluous if the speaker is riding on slate and there's no carpet to punch through.
There are pro audio isolators for speakers like the "SubDude" for subwoofers, look it up.
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