Isoacoustics Orea vs Townshend Seismic Pod on Components

Either system is fine, thank you!

Oh, French units then.  I can do that.  
So 4 springs with a rate of 4000 N/m adds up to 16000 N/m and will yield a natural Frequency of 3.3 Hz.  A little bit lower spring rate will lower the frequency some more.   
Some spring mass system calculators can be found on the web to verify the calculations are done right.  
I’m an old Aerospace engineer but I also worked in Automotive so I can operate in both systems of measurements although I think mostly in English units.

about 37Kg each. 

How much do your speakers weigh?  I sized these springs for my 165 lb speakers to give me a 3 Hz resonance.

thanks! I will buy some and test them too.

It is spring p/n 9657k409. 
‘This link, if it works goes to that page. 

Can you post the link to the springs you bought? 

I know that they will not be the same for my speakers but I could use them for reference.

I have my speakers on springs.  The change in the sound was a revelation.  One of those things that I wish I could go back in time 3 decades and tell myself to put my speakers on springs.  Rubber components dampen, springs isolate.  The most profound effect I found by putting my speakers on springs was reducing speaker cabinet resonance.  Using an accelerometer on the speaker cabinet and the speakers coupled to the floor with spikes- like they have been for decades, I tap on the speaker cabinet  with a steel ball and I can see the speaker cabinet ring for over 2 seconds.  Now I put my speakers on springs sized to have a 3 Hz resonance so that the speakers are isolated from the floor.  I can hit the floor with the steel ball and no vibration is detected on the speaker cabinet.  And then I tap on the speaker cabinet and I see a short pulse and the ringing decays nearly in an instant.  No more interaction between the speaker and the floor.  The sound?  Amazing.  More clarity, sharper focus of images and the bass is clearer and deeper.  Yeah, I really want to go back in time and tell myself to wise up and use springs.

Also, the speakers do not move when playing music.  Verified with the accelerometer.  The cones do not have enough mass to move the speakers.  And even if the speakers moved, it would be at 3 Hz so no impact to the music.

I bought springs from McMaster Carr sized for my speakers and put them under wood platforms.  I also tried Nobsounds on my speakers.  They work too but not as well.  Also confirmed with the accelerometer.  When I tapped on the speaker cabinet supported by Nobsounds with a steel ball the cabinet vibrations took about 1 second to decay.  The music sounded better than with the speakers on spikes but not as good as on my wood platforms with the large springs.

No doubt there is a difference but I only use the Oreas under my components and not my speakers so I really can't relate. 

My JBL 4319 monitors sit on Deer Creek metal stands, just like the ones that JBL sells for their L100 reissue. They're made by a local artist who makes metal sculptures and are of a heavy gauge and filled with some sound deadening foam injected filling.

They sit flat on the carpet and use only felt pads between it and the speakers. 

There's no way I'd use springs of any sort to balance something like that where the speaker leans back. They do not stand straight up. That, and I don't believe that a speaker should move at all when playing music as it would smear the focus of the image at the listening position.

Components are one thing, speakers are another matter.

All the best,
Nonoise

This is the result of adding the Podiums to the speakers, the Nobsound to the subs, getting the room modes as mitigated as possible. I had to get the crossover a little lower and increase the volume on the subs, which increased the energy in the room thus the decay has increased as well but still under/near-lower audible range. 

No room treatment at all so far.

Here is the SPL before and after. I still need to tame a little the 200Hz+ by selecting different tubes, and adding a little more energy below 200Hz. 

Although I do not like to add my opinion, but it is my room, system and  ears I am pretty impressed with I was able to achieve; especially if I consider that the house is made of wood sticks, plaster walls, suspended wood floors and vaulted wood ceilings. In other words a magnificent resonator :) 

Anything under 35Hz is amplified by the room mode and I took care of it by adding a sub and put it in phase canceling (I do not know if this a good English term but the idea is to have the subs cancel/diminish the room modes) as much as possible. I hope you can see the difference. Exact everything to a millimeter, same exact db.

Granted that this measured sound, I do not add what I listen because it is subjective.

@nonoise Thanks! there was something wrong with my account in imgpile.

Here are some interesting

Look at the decay on Orea under my speakers and subs.

Subs at a slight different volume and crossover.

Sub with no isolation, speakers in Nobsounds, look at the difference in decay and stored energy.

@astolfor , I leave the height and width alone unless I need to resize the image. As for using pixels, I don't know what you mean.

Before posting anything, you should click on preview to make sure you have the image before posting. If it doesn't show up when you do that, then it will not show up when you post.

You might try contacting Tammy and see if she can help.

All the best,
Nonoise

@nonoise I do the same thing and not love, but it works on other forums. Do you enter a height and with? Do you use pixels or what?

Our company rename with a new website design and upload this week.

Everything direct coupled even the Energy Room. More disclosure to follow over time.

Tom  

@astolfor , I use the Oreas under my SS gear. No tubes in my system. Knowing I'd hear an improvement by footing the SACD player first (what with all the moving parts), I footed the integrated first, just to see how much benefits could be achieved. 

It was more than I thought. Better focus with darker backgrounds. Doing the SACD player next made the biggest improvement, in all areas.

As for you pictures not posting, I found that you have to have a URL (web address) to grab it from. On the advice of another member, I went and signed up for ImgPile (which is free) and uploaded anything I wanted to post and continue to do so periodically. 

Then, I click on the image on that site with "copy image address" and paste it into the blank URL box of the image icon above. There are extra steps as you have to sign into ImgPile and open your account but it works each and every time in order to copy the image but I'm used to it now. Hope that helps.

All the best,
Nonoise

@nonoise isn't amazing how our ears and equipment work?! is your integrated SS or tube?

The first component I always isolate are the tubes, even a pair of mono amps do not react the same to the same isolation, and my house has all walls, ceilings, made of proper bricks and stone, and doors are think wood too. I even have tried to swap the right with the left and the "right" (maybe it is better said to what I like) isolation follows a specific amp. During the Christmas break I played with one of the rooms using REW to understand what we were listening, it is so fun to get some type of validation on what you are listening. 

I wish I could figure our why my pictures in Google appear as a broken link in my posts. 

Maybe you can help me with it? I click in the picture icon, paste the link i created in Google to the picture I created the link to share, enter the dimensions in the Height and width in pixels and nothing. 

I have the Oreas and they made a big and appreciable difference. I use them under my SACD player and my integrated. They're not going anywhere.

All the best,
Nonoise

How many of you guys are using IsoAcoustics footers under CD/SACD players?

Happy Listening!

Thanks for telling me what pitch is.

I did not say I have perfect pitch :) I did not even know what it was. 

All I know is how the different notes sound, and since those notes sound bigger I deducted that it must be in the 20-32Hz. Maybe if I use REW I can confirm what I am hearing.

But it will not be until mid-late January until I go back to the USA. 

Pitch in music is relative frequency. Perfect pitch is when you can tune for 440 A (for example) without the tuning fork. If you are trying to tell me your perfect pitch is so perfect you know it is 28.5Hz, good one. Mine go down to 18.372 Hz but are down 3.8dB, unless I move my head 3" to the left and then absolutely flat. Try Bela Fleck Flight of the Cosmic Hippo, see what I mean. 

Can you kindly explain me what is "pitch" used for in music terms in English? 

The 28.5Hz is about the sound, but more about how the some of the notes feel. Is hard to explain, but for example  notes like D#0 --- E#0 --- F#0--- G#0--- A#0--- B#0---C#1--Pedal C-- D#1 and even E#1s sound and feel exaggerated; sometimes their decay and, I believe, resonance(?) (if I use Google to translate it says blooming to the feeling I want to express) feel like hitting a hump in the road... especially in some specific passages in the following pieces Dvořák – Cello Concerto in B Lalo – Cello Concerto in D Minor, Schumann – Cello Concerto in A minor, Shostakovich – Cello Concerto No.2 Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto, Boccherini – Cello Concerto in B Flat, Brahms’s Rhapsody in G minor (Op.79; No.2), Alexander Scriabin, Piano Sonatas, Debussy’s Isle Joyeuse.

I know I am being very precise or delicate (?) on how the music sounds but I promise that it can be listened and felt.

Walking away from the room as I did to come back to my family, will be useful to see how the memory of the room sounds reflect on when I listen it again. 

To be frank, I am really surprised how far well this modest system sounds. I do not know if because I did all the work myself, instead of having my partner and dealer set it up, so I notice every incremental step, or the Tannoy Kensington, with the 2 REL, PL300, Steelhead, Acoustic Sound and Koetsu are just a fantastic combination. 

When the 2 new Solid-Tech Rack of Silence, the Montana and the Pathos Heritage arrive to the USA I will spend a couple of days rearranging the system and see where these components take the room.

Now that I think, maybe the extra energy can be modified with the Koetsu gain?

Thank you to all the posters! Bookmarked.

I have learned muchly.

It might be an Android. I don't know. 

Note mechanical is only one part of the energy going into walls, there is also acoustic energy. Main point I'm trying to get across is measured modes are not always entirely due to the shape of the room and speaker locations. Those are a big part of it but the room itself has resonant frequencies determined largely by the composition and structure of the room itself. 

Walls in other words, made of 2x4 and sheetrock, absorb energy and resonate, releasing energy back into the room. Another reason why a DBA is so much better than the old school one sub with EQ and tube traps. 

I have to wonder though, 28.5Hz? Never in my life heard anyone say Wow your system sounds great! All except for that dip at 28.5 Hz. Either you have perfect pitch, or....

@millercarbon I already have the speakers in the podiums. Given the dimensions of my room, those are the room modes and as far as I understand there isn't much it can be done, practically because the room has to continue to function as a living-room. 

The standing energy at 28.5Hz might be able to be tamed by the subs orientation and lowering a little the volume but if it does not improve then I will live with it because as far as I can ear the room's acoustics are pretty flat.

BTW do you know what app Townshend used in their videos and if they used an external accelerometer?

I got a couple of apps but none are sensitive enough on an iPad.

Modes are calculated based on wave lengths and room dimensions. This is a gross simplification. In reality a great deal of energy gets into the walls, floor, and ceiling causing these structural elements to vibrate and produce sound of their own. Some of this due to acoustic energy, sound pressure waves cause the walls to move, store and release energy. A lot is also directly transmitted into them by speakers coupled to the floor by spikes or whatever. 

Isolating speakers on Podiums effectively eliminates this direct path, greatly reducing acoustic problems in the process. Once my whole system was isolated this way it was shocking how great an improvement it made. One can easily expend a great deal of time and effort trying to damp and remove this, when it is far easier and more effective to eliminate the problem at its source.

Feliz Navidad!!! to everyone from Badalona Spain. 

@lemonhaze you are correct, if my math is correct modes for my room are  

34.1Hz ,42.95 Hz ,54.84Hz,..., 

The energy at 28.5Hz is a strange one, I will need to continue to move the subs around and see if I can correct it. If I can't correct it with the the sub placement then it might be a room mode given the vaulted ceilings.

@nonoise, I have also found little or no difference with my Isoacoustics Oreas. I have Gaia feet under my OB speakers but not sure about differences here. To fit them I bolted some 40mm angle iron to the sides which were drilled and tapped to take the feet. What this did was to help stabilise the speaker. I heard a slightly cleaner sound but don't know if it came from the extra stability or the feet or probably the combination.

@astolfor, you state you still have energy at 28.5 and 321Hz. This is possibly just some nodes found in all rooms which usually show many more than just 2.   Your English is actually very good. There are some native English speakers on these forums who fail to use punctuation, correct grammar and have problems spelling.

Yours is the second post I've read where no difference in sound was heard with the Oreas for your components. I had the complete opposite results which parallel the ones some say they got with the Pods, and I'm not alone on this.

All the best,
Nonoise

An option I found works very well is to put the whole rack on Townshend Seismic Corners. The effect is substantial, and similar to isolating each component with 4 pods. Having done this then subsequently isolating individual components makes no difference.  So the cost saving is potentially substantial.

Prior to having done this I found the Townshend pods much better than the Isoacoustic Orea on components. To be honest the latter made no difference to the sound. The Gaia feet on the speakers on the other hand were transformative.

Yea, real bad idea. Probably the worst is to stack one on top of the other. 

Is it just me, or is bolting equipment into a rack so that everything is physically attached in the tightest possible manner a really bad idea?

MC-Actually I was tempted to say exactly that. Townshend Seismic Podiums are 4 times better? But I don’t know that for sure. There is a debate between active devices like the podiums and passive ones like SRA platforms, etc.

This video is what really sold me.

I replaced BDR Cones under my rack with Pods. The improvement was easy to see. Not hear, see! My rack is 750lbs solid concrete and granite. Even so when I would walk up my weight would make it rock. On Cones it would rock very fast and a small amount that was hard to see. But my tone arm uses a weight on the end of fishing line for side bias. The weight swinging back and forth was a dead giveaway that the rack had moved.

Now on Pods it is a lot easier to see the rack sway. I'm sure it swings more now than before. But, and this is the important part, at a much lower frequency. Well below anything that matters. This is easy to see as the side bias weight almost never swings at all. So even though the whole rack moves it is moving way down below 4Hz - probably more like 1 or 2 Hz- which might as well be motionless. It is really mind blowing the way this huge massive rack can move so smooth and slow from even the slightest touch. Even the gentle pressure of putting the cue lever down will move it. I can also touch gently with a finger and stop it. Crazy!

@arafiq I am glad you found something that made a difference for good in your system.

@millercarbon music is to be listened and enjoyed more than measured. What I am learning on this forum, is that people like to make opinions and believes  into facts and then since there is no way to prove things get out of control in anger.

I think I mentioned before, I only measured because the sound quality changed so much that I though that there had to be a way to measure. There are ways to measure how sound changes, and I have used these measurements to help me understand why I was not hearing differences when others claimed that there was. I know I am gifted with sensitive ears so to me was more like a sanity check if you wish. I did not hear much improvement when using the IsoAcoustic products from spikes or even cork,   but when I put the Nobsound I did, at the beginning the sound sounded dull, but at least I was able to hear a difference. That is when I started to think how to go about more scientifically and measure. I always let my dealer place the speakers, and my partner to setup the TT, but this time I had time in the USA for me to experiment and learned a little about sound. As a result now, I can somewhat back up and explain what I hear with measurements to my partner and friends. These experiments learned me how connect the dots in my ear and systems.

I do not know how accurate the iPad seismograph is  so I can't comment. I was shown by friend how to measure the effectiveness of isolation and decoupling with an accelerometer and a laser. It very well be that the accelerometer in the iPad is good enough, I just do not know any of this stuff. I started to be curious a long time ago but did not have the time to spend time doing experiments and learn. 

I do experiments and math for living and I listen to music to peace my mind. I will not be doing more of these measurements until I get the new racks and see if they make a difference that I can quantify.  

@ryder ​​​​@astolfor -- thank you for helping me with the adjustments. I finally settled on 2 springs per footer in the front, and 4 springs per footer in the back. All footers are directly underneath the chassis. Happy to report that there's definitely a subtle yet noticeable improvement. If I have to sum it up I would say everything seems to have tightened up a little ... better imaging, bit more resolution (I'm hearing more into the music if you will), and tighter bass. It''s like someone wiping an already clean mirror with windex. You get that extra bit of shine that you didn't know was missing. It's amazing how simply changing the spring configuration can have a noticeable improvement in SQ.

The differences are not night and day, but they are easily discernible. You can't ask for more from something that costs so little. 

mglik, So it is safe to say you're trying to tell us Townshend is four times as good? 😂 Sorry man, couldn't resist.

I'm not real big on measurements, much prefer to give credence to what myself and others actually hear. But the laser thing, vs the iPad seismograph, what would you say is the difference, astolfor?

@millercarbon you are correct, either platform the Podiums or Credo will do a fantastic job. The Podiums get the prize in my opinion because the wide range for all kinds of speakers.

I will try to make a comparison for components but for it to be fair I need a very sensitive accelerometer, and able to get the laser tracer out of the lab again. 

So delete 3 of them.

Regards

Repeatedly, the post failed. See it did not.
The Audiogon system did these repeats. Sorry…

When I installed Townshend Seismic Podiums on my speakers the improvement in SQ was as much or more than any component. Transformative!

When I installed Townshend Seismic Podiums on my speakers the improvement in SQ was as much or more than any component. Transformative!

When I installed Townshend Seismic Podiums on my speakers the improvement in SQ was as much or more than any component. Transformative!

When I installed Townshend Seismic Podiums on my speakers the improvement in SQ was as much or more than any component. Transformative!

So kinda what I thought, within margin of error, so to speak. Yeah they are pretty remarkable. Once you get used to hearing speakers on them it is kinda hard for anything not on Podiums to compare.

I used Tannoy Kensington for speakers, I bought the podium you recommended. I told John David Hannant what speakers I had and I bought what he recommended. 

The Credo, I bought with the EV Reference One a while ago, and I got the bases  shipped to the USA while I was waiting for my new turntable and Pathos I was supposed to get a month ago. 

I gave up waiting last Saturday and came home to spend Christmas and New Years with my friends and family.

I would not draw too much of a conclusion between the  Credo and Podiums, for the numbers to be mathematically  relevant to a 1/100th I would need another 500 or so measurements. 

As far as it goes, the Podiums do an incredible job in improving decay, overall distortion, timing and group decay. 

astolfor- It is interesting your measurements show Iso Acoustics don’t even measure as well as Nobsound, as your results there mirror what people actually hear. Rapid decay is mainly what these things are all about, and so it is odd to see the older Credo design measure better, even if only slightly, than the newer Townshend.

Townshend has been making the Podium quite a long time, with the current version having come quite a ways since early days. The only Credo version I know was copied from one of those older/earlier Podiums. There’s a Credo video that pretends to show results similar to yours, and it is a quite good video, you have to watch real close to see how they deceptively manipulated to make it look that way.

All of which makes me wonder, exactly what Credo and Podium were compared? What was the speaker, how much did it weigh, and what pods were in the Podiums?

What's your reference of a spike and did you need to take out a loan to pay for said spike?  Tom