Any new ideas on an old theme?

I am closer to Shadorne on this one - in part because I haven't tried the spend-ier route prescribed by Fafafion.

I have had great luck using bamboo (very dense) boards between the floor and the speakers, and four dots of blutack between the the speakers and the bamboo boards. Very thick maple chopping blocks or solid boards may work equally well or better. I would try comparing blutack to you speaker's spikes between the speakers and the boards to see what sounds best to you. The thicker and heavier the block(s) of wood, the better they will be at dampening and absorbing vibrations coming from the speaker cabinets. These "isolation" boards can also serve to buffer vibration getting to the structure of you house, reducing possible effects on your other audio components.

I was also absolutely astounded at what placing a large hardwood cutting board under my CD player did to tame digital nasties. I assume this was due to the ability of the wood to "drain" high frequency internal vibrations away from the player, since the effect was equally startling listening through headphones. Twice as thick = >4x as good! I experimented with different ways to suspend the player above the wooden block (blutack - slightly dull, sorbothane - dull, small hardwood blocks - too much resolution) and decided that the stock feet had the best balance between resolution and smooth presentation.

just get longer spikes. I was able to get replacement spikes for a REL sub (really long) through musical surroundings in Berkeley.

Decouple, because the floor boards are a big, flexible, poorly braced structure which will radiate sound.

If you have nice speakers where even the sub-woofer enclosures are braced every 7-8" to keep panel resonances out of the pass-band, why would you put them on top of a wooden structure that isn't even braced every 10'?

If the bass drivers aren't mounted in a bipole configuration you'll get more rocking of the speakers when they're not anchored to the floor although the speakers are so massive compared to the drivers' moving components (even a heavy sub woofer isn't half a pound, when a light weight speaker cabinet is 50+ pounds) that the lost driver motion is inconsequential.

ALL interesting and thoughtful comments . . . there is a long thread on this very topic at the steve hoffman site that was recently led by commercial sound engineer barry diament . . . he's a big fan of "floating" spkrs w/rollerballs and disks (symposium rollerball, jr., finite elemente cerabase--barry has similar devices of his own making) . . .

I have some disks from ANOTHER well-known maker (name escapes me) being used under various components, and I plan to try 3 of them under one of my harbeths. (Barry's rec'd also involves a very flat, smooth slab of tile or plexi under each spkr w/the disks between slab and spkr).

dc

Very interesting discussion here. If you use the wood pedestal under the speakers is it best to simply lay it on the carpet or would it be better to spike the wood block to the floor? I think I may try it this weekend.