Should I use Speaker Spike / Isolation Base or Something?

+1 for Isoacoustics footers + carpet spikes (if needed).  They sit under my ATC 40A towers and work marvelously.  Very real improvement.

Spikes vs springs.  The extremes.  Pucks are intermediate.

I go back to well before spikes first started.  The principle was that if the speaker is prevented from moving/vibrating due to reaction to cone displacement or in-room resonances the sound and particularly the image reaching a stationary listener would not be corrupted by such movement/vibration.

Later it was suggested that the vibration of the speaker under the signal sends mode down the spikes and thence into the floor, causing that to vibrate and create unwanted modes.  Newtonian physics says this must be so.  The modes might be significant with a suspended wooden floor.

That's why, having the opportunity, for the last 30 years I have set my systems up in rooms with a concrete floor screed laid on footings bearing directly on the ground.  Tile the screed if you like but the speakers will bear on a massive solid surface that is in effect almost infinitely mass-loaded as it bears directly on planet Earth.  Any modes reaching the points of the spikes will create less than negligible modes in the floor.  In fact I mass-load support in the same way for all my equipment including amplifiers and particularly turntable where gains in sound stability are remarkable.

MC is entirely incorrect on springs.  This is completely the wrong approach unless they as so stiff as to have no elastic function.  Springs allow the speaker to move relative to a stationary listener and smear whatever signal comes out.  In a worst case scenario it will oscillate like a pendulum under the reactive forces of the spring - it will counter movement in one direction by generating movement in the other - the design purpose of a spring.  The result will be pretty much like saving your money on springs and placing the speaker directly on deep pile carpet.

I am another in favor of the ISO Acoustics. I use the GAIA II and the carpet spikes. Huge improvement on focus and bass articulation.  

I tried all kinds of things....nothing was better than the spikes I have...many a definite reduced performance.  I'm lucking in that my speakers on their spikes, are on ceramic tile, that are cemented to the foundation of the house.

stringreens         +1 +1 +1

stereo5     Why not try with just the spikes?