DIY speaker isolation base for a wood floor

From Sorbothane.com

• Sorbothane® combines shock absorption, good memory, vibration isolation and vibration damping characteristics.
• Sorbothane® can absorb over 50 percent of vibration energy over most of its temperature operating range at frequencies from 10 to 30,000 hertz.

From me: Sorbothane acts as both a shock absorber and a spring. That is one of the reasons why it is effective. The problem that may arise with Sorbothane alone is getting the resonant frequency. Best to use their calculator and you may need to cut pieces to the size you need and pay attention to the Shore hardness. A very approximate rule of thumb is if the Sorbothane is compressed 30-50% you are getting pretty good isolation (~90%). 50% compression should put you under 10Hz resonant frequency.

Sorbothane is one of the worst materials ever foisted on naive and gullible audiophiles. I put Sorbothane in the same category as SONEX and lead. Sorbothane is just another pretender. There are many black semi-soft viscoelastic materials that audiophiles have used for resonance control. Sorbothane is actually on the bottom of the list of ones I’ve experimented with. Sorbothane seems like such a good material, not too soft, not too hard. Little bit why audiophiles think lead is a good damping material. LOL

People would be far off in the long run 🏃‍♂️if they follow my suggestion of mass-on-spring isolation for their isolation needs and look around for an effective viscoelastic material for their constrained layer damping materials. It’s far better to leave things undamped than to over-dump in the great word of Acoustic Revive.

That someone would compare Lead to Sorbathane, i.e. a soft metal to a visco-elastic polymer makes me really question what message they are trying to communicate. Lead would be more an analog to granite, SONEX an analog to a GIK acoustic panel.


To experiment properly with Sorbothane, one has to properly implement it, which means using the correct hardness material as well as the correct cross-sectional area for the weight being supported, no different from a spring. Unfortunately, people just say "Sorbathane" or spring, without the required knowledge to properly implement and hence they lead people astray.

SONEX is an acoustic foam, so not sure why you are bringing that into the equation ..... however, just like Sorbothane or a spring, it must be properly implemented to work well.