Thiel Owners

For Thiel speakers placed on pad- and carpet-covered plywood floors (on 16" centers), is there any consensus that it is better to couple the speakers to the floor using spikes or better to decouple the speakers from the floor using springs or similar isolation products. Or is it simply a matter of choice based on the "sound" of the floor and the user's preference for tighter but leaner bass versus looser but fuller-sounding bass? 

sdl4,

Funny you should ask :-)

I’ve been going through just those experiments again.

I’m sure it will be room and listener dependent. My Thiel 2.7s are on a carpeted wood floor.

I have tried herbies footers, sliders, spikes, various forms of decoupling, isoacoustics footers, and finally even (expensive!) Townshend audio isolation bars (spring based).


In every case I found the sound to be "better" when the speakers were simply sitting directly on the carpeted floor. No spikes. Nuthin.’

The thing is one of the aspects I’ve been going for in my system is a sense of density palpability and impact. Not just the airy-fairy hologramsof many speakers, but a sense of instruments and voices having some acoustic power, moving air. In essence - the opposite of the electrostatic speaker sound :-)

Horn speakers tend to do this by nature, I find. But I can’t accommodate horn speakers (and not sure I’d fully get along with them anyway). So I’ve tried my best with regular box dynamic speakers. Thiels have a dense, focused sound. I find my CJ tube amps add yet another aspect of being filled out sounding, sometimes vinyl playback add yet more of this effect, and I play with room acoustics and speaker/listener arrangement to get there too.

Whenever I have decoupled the speakers from just sitting on the floor, whatever benefits there were have been outweighed by a change in the tonality away from what I like and find convincing in my speakers (usually footers/decoupling makes it a bit too dark sounding when decoupled) and a loss of density and impact.

The speakers may "disappear" a bit better, the sound may get a bit smoother etc, but the actual sense of realism and air-moving/room engaging impact takes a step back. I don’t want to take that step back.

So, that’s at least where I am, thus far.

beetlemania

And other AYRE fans/owners, did you Guys change out the stock fuses ?
If so, which brand(s) is/are a sonic match?

Happy Listening!

prof,

Thanks for the detailed information about your speaker isolation "experiments." This is exactly the type of info I was looking for. In your system and room, what specific sonic differences have you noticed between the use of the standard Thiel spikes versus placement of spikeless speakers directly on the carpeted floor?

I'm presuming that the spikes would couple the speakers more directly to the wood floor while eliminating the spikes would allow the carpet and foam pad to "slightly" decouple the speakers from the wood floor without losing the density and realism you're trying to achieve. Or maybe that isn't how it actually works. Any further clarification of your findings would be very helpful.

sdl4,

Unfortunately you are asking for clarification on the one comparison I feel less sure about.


It's been quite a while since I had spikes under my 2.7s.   The 2.7s were second hand and didn't come with spikes.  But since I also owned the 3.7s at the same time for quite a while, I had grabbed the spikes and tried them on the 2.7s.   But I sold those spikes with the 3.7s years ago now.


Anyway, simply from memory, I don't remember the spikes changing the sound very much (which is a good thing IMO).   But it was easier to shift the speakers around on the floor without them, so I didn't keep using them.


But spikes are definitely the case where my memory on this may be less reliable, since I haven't had them for a while.

FWIW:  The Herbies big sliders worked really well under my speakers.  Didn't "help" the sound in any way I noticed but didn't seem to hinder it much.   I took them off recently to try the Townshend bars but haven't bothered to put them back on afterward, so the speakers are just sitting on my floor.  Sounding great :-)