Best treatment for speaker feet????


Looking for input on best way to handle speaker feet. Couple or decouple? Spikes or rubbber? Granite or no granite?

My situation is, 80lb floorstanding speakers on carpet over plywood decking on second floor.

Opinions appreciated!
jaxwired
My preference for my room/speakers...
(flooring is padded carpeting over poured cement basement floor)
18" x 18" Travertine tile, 2" thick maple plinth from Timber Nation on that, then Totem Ball & Claw supporting Totem Forests on the maple plinth.

Ball & Claw being sort of unique to Totem, I'd go w/spikes in their place.

I didn't like the sound when using rubbery sort of stuff under the speakers.
Try making a platform of cinder blocks. They are cheap and might really improve things. I would also put spikes under the speakers. I am using Vandersteen 5A's that come with spikes. In my last home in New Jersey, my listening room was on the second floor the flooring itself was oak. When I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona with Travertine tile floors and no basement, the speakers sounded so much better, I couldn't believe the difference. My other suggestion is to move.
I would not recommend spiking speakers to a suspended wood floor. That will transmit energy from the speaker to the floor and end up shaking the floor and walls. I can easily hear this with my speakers on a suspended wood floor. And I can fell it as well. The LF energy moves along the floor and shakes the chair. I like the rigidity of spiking, but not what a shaking room does to frequencies.

I found decoupling (with large Herbie audio dots) works better than spiking, but it's still not perfect.

The best I've tried to date is using Nordost Pulsar points. I feel no bass from the floor. It is amazing how much bass can be transmitted to the floor and conversely how you can reduce it significantly. And the sound is very good. I think any product along the lines of bearings in a cup would work well.

Wish I had a concrete pad but I get pretty good results with the Pulsar Points.
Bmckenney -- think about this: your speakers/drivers (unless you're talking about down-firing subwoofers) vibrate horizontally. Your floor vibrates vertically. So it's not your speakers that are exciting the floor. It's the air pressure (SPL) of the waves in the room (which are omnidirectional) that are exciting the floor, and there's not much you can do about that, other than stiffen the floor from below, or by adding another layer of subfloor.

Decouplers on speakers are always inappropriate anyway, because the object is to restrain the speaker enclosure from any kind of movment whatsoever. And anything resilient between the speaker and the floor (or slab) that allows the speaker to rock forward/backward in equal-but-opposite reaction to the movment of the driver(s) will degrade performance: bass slam and hi-freq. transient response. So the notion of decoupling a speaker from the floor is completely counterproductive in terms of getting the best performance, and any speaker manufacturer will tell you that! Some people might like the way their speakers sound when they decouple them (God knows why!?) but they are definitely NOT operating the way their designer intended,

So get your speakers back on their spikes, but pay some attention to positioning them (relative to the floor joists) as I outlined above.
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