Does raising speaker cables off the floor really make a big difference?

These are the type of subjects that self-reputed "Golden Ears" love.To them, it only re-enforces that they have Golden Ears, which is a psychologically-comfortable status.


I’m not talking simply about any audiophile who tries something out in his system, "hears" something he likes and goes with it. Cool stuff!Rather, I’m talking about a certain attitude, or defense-mechanism, found among some portion in the audiophile community.



It’s like psychics or spiritualists: "Oh, you can’t hear the voices of the spirits like I can? Poor thing, it must be hard to be so deficient in spiritual sensitivity!"


So the Golden Ear does some tweak "test" in the usual subjective manner, believes he hears a difference and...well...that’s that! Truth Has Been Found!



If YOU listen to the same thing and don’t hear a difference then, no it can’t be contrary evidence, it can’t be the Golden Ear could possibly be fooling himself; no, the Golden Ear’s subjective impressions method is inviolable so it MUST be some deficiency in you who "can not hear what I hear."


That’s why this always plays out with snipes against the hearing acuity of anyone skeptical of a Golden Ear claim. The Golden Eared Subjectivist assumes his own method as veridical. And since the Golden Ear usually won’t truly put his Golden Ears to controlled testing - e.g. with controls for "not peeking" to really see if he can actually distinguish what he claims. - then the Golden Ear is never faced with a true challenge to his claims.



So he can go on to his heart’s content claiming to hear whatever he/she wants, his Golden Ear status unchallenged (at least to himself/herself), with the added satisfying benefit that anyone arguing about negative results is simply hapless and hasn’t reached the GE’s "Golden Ear" status of acuity for the claimed phenomenon.


You’ll recognize these Golden Ears by the attitude that challenging their perception will rarely result in their admitting to the possibility they have fooled themselves, but rather skeptical inquiry will tend to be met with some version of: "you don’t have the ears/gear to detect it" trope.
(And, btw, I happily admit that there ARE audiophiles who believe in various tweaks, but who go to some effort to produce some rational/evidential arguments in their favor).

It’s much easier to isolate a subwoofer than speakers generally, anyway, due to center of gravity issues and subs are most likely more of a problem, you know, with the much lower frequencies so that’s where I’d put my money first - on isolating the subwoofer.

geoff,

I may have missed the post to which you are replying, but are you talking about isolating speakers/subwoofers from the surface on which they sit?

Can you clarify why you see it as easier to do so with a subwoofer?  Do you mean perhaps that a taller main tower speaker may become more "tippy" when you try isolation underneath?  


Not challenging your claim, just wondering about the details.

The reason for “isolating speakers” is not really to prevent vibrations from the floor being transmitted to the speakers, although that would occur, it’s to prevent the vibrations from speaker cabinets being transmitted to the front end electronics via the floor (mechanical feedback). Isolation systems are two-way 🔚🔜 systems, as illustrated in that Townshend YouTube video - they attenuate vibrations in both directions! 

I suggest isolating subwoofers for two reasons - (1) they are easier to isolate and (2) their frequencies are lower than speakers and do more damage potentially. In a perfect world everything would be isolated - cables, power supplies, DAC, solid state amplifier. The reason speakers with high center of gravity are a problem is that springs under load lack sufficient later support unless the springs are placed far apart from each other in a wide pattern. That wide pattern of springs is much more stable. Small springs are more stable than taller springs.

Some of the tweaks do make a difference although me myself have not heard one that made a big impact. I prefer to upgrade a component first before tweaking my system. Like installing a simple AC filter choke that so far has worked in every component I have installed one in, but that is just me.

Happy Listening.