Shocked removed spikes, used blue tack, what other non spike footer


My floor standing speakers, monitor stands always came with spikes so I used them always, it's the way they were designed at least I thought. I know everyone can't do this because of there floor type, mine is hardwood over concrete slab. Bass, more natural tone( I'm a tone junkie)  gives the music a nice rhythm, may just be flavor of month but I'm really enjoying it. Highs maybe little rolled off, I just did it yesterday, maybe not as hifi, but no lose of information. Have other people experienced this.Can someone with my floor type suggest a nice reasonable priced non spiked footer, these are floorstander filled with shot so pretty heavy,maybe 70- 80 lb. thanks

paulcreed
I had some mdf laying around drilled counter hole, mounted spikes and placed blue tak between mdf platform. Sounds more refined but in a good way and little fuller than just spikes but lost that natural tone even though is a little too heavy, I'm back on blue tak. Raining 4 days, stuck inside. Crossover is outboard I'm going to remove solid copper post and go straight in to crossover with solid core silver speaker wire. Maybe that will remove some of the thick sound and lift the highs, if not I'll try herbies first. Can someone explain what Gaia' do different than spikes, is it really worth the cost. Never knew footers had such an impact, it's pretty drastic in my case.

It's a complicated business, at least for me. Better isolation will let you hear the drivers better with a cleaner sound mainly due to reduced baffle/cabinet/ drive unit chatter and resonance. I think.

But that's not always a good thing because a loudspeaker is the sum of its parts and the way they interact. Sometimes cleaning up the sound gives the impression of a weak bass performance.

Especially for designs that don't sound particularly full in the first place. Those kind of speakers that need turning up loud to sound full may never sound full enough once the sound has been cleaned up by isolation in this manner. 
So you could end up with a result of a cleaner but thinner sound, is losing more than you gain.

On the other hand isolating can work wonders with speakers that might suffer from slight bass heavy / muddy signatures.

I had an interesting  experience  recently. I was moving around my speakers with some pads to dial them in. They formerly used spikes and were in essentially  the same location. I removed the pads but did not reinstall  the spikes. A few days later I fired up my system and everything  from the bass to the treble sounded MUCH better in virtually  every way, and I couldn't figure out why. Turns out the pads  had some sticky glue on them that rubbed off on the speaker bottom and "tacky glue" them to the wood floors coupling the largest available surfaces together. Put the spikes back on and performance deteriorated  significantly. this was a great "test" as I had no idea what happened  so not a placebo effect. 
You will have more apparent bass when a very low velocity material is added to the equation. Slower than lead like all the rubber and spongy materials. Like placing your hand over your mouth and speaking. No highs no breath of sound mosly lows. The Shear velocity of the material chosen, geometric shape of the device..shape and speed of the material above and below are also of great importance. Your audio room will sound best with no right angles and corners as will every other area of your component high fi. Only a small portion of what takes place between 2 or more materials and their shapes. Tom
These speakers go down to 27hz and have nice bass even with spikes at low volume not only hear bass but feel it too, but no spikes just seem to appeal to me since there removal.Removing Cardas all copper binding post with speaker wire going straight into crossover brought back a lot of air and clarity. They do have ambiance rear tweeter with volume knob I had to adjust a little.( I've always kept it fairly low and still do). One problem with blue tak was piano, the sharpness and projection was muffled a little and not true, that is pretty much gone. This is not the way I planned to solve footer problem with rewire but it's helped a lot with piano and highs. It will hold me over till I can find solution to replace spikes. I still have caps to install so this will help too, this is a strange hobby. Still open to suggestion even if I had to do Gaia but damn for $600 it better be like a small component change not a tweek.