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Townshend Audio Podiums: The Full Review

I’ve been fascinated with the importance of vibration control for more than three decades now. A lot of my experience is already covered in Millercarbon's Mega Vibration Control Journey https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/millercarbon-s-mega-vibration-control-journey The Journey ended with springs. Then I got Pods, and wrote Vibration Control and the Townshend Audio Seismic Pods https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/vibration-control-and-the-townshend-audio-seismic-pods Now as we continue our journey forward it is time to review the Townshend Audio Podiums.  

Podiums are based on the same basic engineering used in Pods. A spring is encased in a rubber sleeve that functions as a sort of bellows, trapping the air inside. At the top the spring is attached to a threaded metal plate with a single very precise small hole in it. The threads are for height adjustment and the hole is to allow air to pass through. A very small, precision-controlled amount of air. This tiny little hole allows the air to function as a damper.  

A fundamental challenge with springs is they bounce. We want them to bounce. But we do not want them to keep bouncing! When that happens we say it resonates, and resonance adds color. It is a form of distortion, and we don’t want it. Springs all by themselves are already very good at isolation. Please read the above threads to see just how good they are. But even as good as they are springs do have this problem of resonance.  

The problem with damping is figuring out how to achieve it, and how much to use? The air valve method Max Townshend invented uses only a couple percent damping ratio and does this with air alone and no moving parts. Genius!  

The four damped spring towers are attached to a very dense, massive and inert plinth. My traditional knuckle rap test yielded a very satisfactory ’thunk’. Stiff and highly damped, it is also covered in an extremely durable and beautiful finish. Sliding speakers on and off left zero marks on them, and they really are handsome to look at.  

The damped spring towers at each corner are threaded for two different leveling adjustments. The first is to level the unloaded Podium on the floor. This first step eliminates any problems or situations where the floor is not perfectly level. This adjustment (if necessary) is made with a special thin wrench that comes supplied with the Podiums.

The speakers are then placed on the Podiums and fine tuned for precision placement. At this point, loaded with 150lbs worth of Moabs, making fine positioning adjustments on my thick carpet proved a bit of a challenge. The solution I came up with was BDR Round Things under the footers. Furniture gliders would probably also work. If it is even a problem. My carpet and pad are very thick. They do look like they will work beautifully on hardwood flooring.  

Once perfectly positioned the speakers are raised by turning the knobs at each corner. There is a process to doing this. First all four are turned equally, until all four corners are floating free and clear. It is essential to allow freedom of motion in all planes. Once this is achieved then the speakers can be adjusted perfectly level by turning the knobs in pairs- the two on the left or right, or the two on the front or back. Adjusting in pairs this way avoids diagonal rocking.  

Describing this process in print is hard but doing it in practice is easy. In fact this was the coolest part of setting them up! With the Podiums I was able to place my level right on the Podium. Even fully loaded with about 150lbs of Moabs and BDR the knobs turn silky smooth, and precision leveling is super easy.

Okay, okay, so how do they sound? In a word: wonderful! This can’t come as much of a surprise. They are after all basically Pods attached to a plinth, and the Pods work wonderfully under everything I have tried. Still, the Podiums are pretty impressive.  

The first thing I noticed was improvement in the direction of what I would call a more natural sound. Natural sounds are almost never described as having glare or strain. Natural sounds can be quite loud. But there is a difference in nature between a loud natural sound and the same sound through a system. They may measure the same volume but we have no trouble hearing the difference.

At this point I have to agree with Max and say that the difference is ringing. Natural sounds start and stop very quickly. Sounds reproduced by our systems cause the system itself to vibrate, then the room, and the room feeds back into the system until the whole thing is ringing like a bell. This all happens very fast and can be seen demonstrated on a seismograph placed on a speaker. https://youtu.be/BOPXJDdwtk4?t=6

In any case, whatever the explanation it is clear there is a lot less glare and strain with speakers on the Townshend Podiums. This results for me in a lot less listener fatigue. Another thing I find is that while I don’t necessarily need to turn the volume up, when I do it is way more enjoyable! The combination of speakers like Moabs capable of playing very loud and strain-free with Podiums is intoxicating!

The next thing I’m hearing is a massive improvement in what I would call truth of timbre, or tone, or whatever you want to call it that makes each individual instrument sound more like itself and not any other. Not the big differences that distinguish a steel from a string guitar, but the little details that distinguish one wood-bodied gut-stringed guitar from another. Not hyped-up count the spittle hitting the mic details either but the sort of tonal shadings that distinguish the real vocal talent from the second-tier. Even now after more than a month on Podiums still I put on records that have me going Wow that wood block really is a wood block!  

This is why I spent so much time explaining Max’s damping mechanism. Before Podiums my Moabs were on springs. The load was the same, and the springs were properly sized for the load. However, the springs on my DIY platforms were not damped. Consequently, they had their characteristic resonance. This resonance colors everything played on them. Like viewing the world through rose-colored glasses- you may like what you see but that ain’t the world! Now on Podiums the world as presented by the Moabs is full blown Ultra Panavision 70! https://vashivisuals.com/the-hateful-eight-ultra-panavision-70/

Those who follow me know I am not just about sound quality, I am also about value. Because I am so passionate about sound quality, but have only limited resources, I have to be. No way I have enough money to go chasing the latest and greatest. One look at my system anyone can see how hard I will work if it will get the job done for less. https://systems.audiogon.com/systems/8367 

For sure springs will do a very fine job for very low cost. Just about any spring, properly tuned and used, will outperform an awful lot of stuff that costs a whole lot more. For sure anyone in the market for good vibration control solutions- and that should be everyone! - should consider springs. But Townshend Podiums are so much better than ordinary springs that I have to say that even at their price they are not just as good value, but even better. They are that good.


128x128millercarbon
prof
3,479 posts
 

I already had plans to order Townshend Seismic Isolation Bars for my speakers.

And I’m probably known here for being skeptical and not being a tweak-head

Here’s why I’m likely ordering the Townshend product:

I had bought a substantial higher mass turntable that was going to go on an unfortunately older, flimsier Lovan audio rack (it just happens to fit where I need my stereo gear to go). It’s on a wood floor that transmits plenty of vibration to the turntable. My son walks around like Godzilla and can skip a record from another room!


I spent a couple months testing all sorts of isolation devices and materials in making an isolation platform for underneath my turntable.My testing included both feeling for vibrations being reduced (with my hand) and also using seismometer apps on my ipad and iphone to measure vibrations.


Of all the materials, from constrained layer damping, to sorbathane, to footers of various types, nothing remotely compared to the effect of the Townshend spring based Isolation Pods. It was a fundamental shift in efficacy. If I put the 2 1/2" maple block platform just sitting atop my existing rack and stomped on the floor, I would measure huge ringing spikes of vibrations getting through and could easily feel them. With the Isolation Pods holding up the platform and then stomping on the floor I couldn’t feel a THING coming through to the platform and the vibration apps measured almost nothing. It blew me away. So they formed an important part of my turntable’s isolation base. And now my son doesn’t skip the records. Any other sonic benefits beyond that, I can’t say (for one thing, I couldn’t do a before and after, since I needed to build this thing to even put the turntable on the rack).

So I became intrigued by the other Townshend spring-based products, and by his demos. It seemed clear from my experience that the springs can have an enormous effect on isolation, and the Townshend demos seemed for the speakers seemed to show similar effects.

Before committing I noticed there were some spring-based isolation footer products on amazon, quite cheap. So I grabbed 8 of those and placed them under my speakers (Thiel 2.7 at the moment). I’ve always preferred my Thiels sitting directly on the floor vs spikes or footers.

I was blown away by the difference in sound! First, without the footers there was very clear interaction between the speakers and the floor. With music on even relatively loud, I could easily feel the floor vibrating around the speakers. With the footers...nothing from the floor!

But the sound of the speakers decoupled from the floor was was fascinating. Basically it was a version of what most people report with the Townshend product. The speakers seemed to "disappear" as sound sources, the soundstage widened and deepened, the bass became tighter and more refined, and the mids and highs became cleaner sounding, imaging more 3D. It was a very obvious effect and I enjoyed re-listening to plenty of tracks for a while.

But with these little footers it wasn’t all pros. I did find the sound became a bit less dense and palpable and punchy, a bit more elctrostatic-like. After several days I removed the footers and that sense of density and punch returned, though losing a bit of the other properties I mentioned with the footers. Though on balance if I had to choose, I liked the sound more with the speakers just on the floor. I seek density and palpability in sound and it’s hard to give up.

But this has given me the itch to try the Townshend products, which are more purpose-built and should be much higher quality. The little spring footers were just fairly thin, bare springs held together with a top and bottom. They had no wrapping to damp them like the Townshend so they were particularly wobbly. Secondly, they raised the speaker off the floor by about 1 1/2" and that in itself can alter the sound (I did adjust my seating height for a while, to keep tweeters/mids at the same relationship to my ears). The Townshend Isolation Bars are designed to essentially isolate the speakers without raising them up appreciably, keeping that same tonal balance they had without the bars. So I can believe reports that say you get more of the good stuff from the spring isolation without loosing bass punch and image density.


So, I figure from my experience it’s worth a try.





mglik
911 posts
 
I use SRA platforms for my TT and my preamp. Actually waiting for the preamp platform. But the TT one was an extreme transformation.
I admire how many of you are able to describe, in detail, the SQ.
I don’t go there and prefer to not “tear apart the flower”.
All I can say is that the improvement in SQ made me a believer in vibration control and a major fan of SRA. Silent Running Audio, like Shunyata, has a division that makes products for science, medical and military. The preamp platform I am waiting on is called an Ohio Class. SRA’s top line is the Virginia Class. Names to refer to how Nuclear Submarines use their products!
I think SRAs absorb vibration in a very sophisticated combination of materials. Think they have about 40 patents.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Two things about the "punch" prof, one is as Rick told me, you will know it is right when the punch is through the air and chest not the chair and butt. A lot of what we think of as bass slam is just the speaker vibrating the floor and chair. You never will have as much of that.  

But the fact it is going through the floor and chair also means it is going through the floor and equipment, smearing sound all over the place. I'm sure part of the clarity improvement from the Podiums is less vibration getting to the turntable and amp. 

The second thing is I used different springs like Nobsound and some others and they were just like you described. If you play around with loading you can tune the balance to reduce some of what you don't like. But you will always be left with a little less of that slam impact. With Townshend, I don't know how Max does it, but there is more slam. Not the same as on the floor, because it is no longer coming through the floor. But relative to other springs the bass has a much more solid foundation, more visceral impact. 

The difference I would describe as with nothing or spikes the string bass player is there and you feel it in your butt. With springs the bass player is a little more there and you feel it in your chest. With Podiums the bass player is THERE! and you feel his fingers plucking each string, you feel the body of the instrument, you feel the bass player doing his little hmmmhmmm thing they all do, and it is just way more organically palpably real and THERE! To steal Fremer's line, "there's more there there!"  
prof
3,479 posts
 

Sounds good millercarbon!
(All my source equipment, turntable, digital, amplifiers etc are in a separate room far from my listening room, so vibration from being in the same room as the speakers playing isn't a concern in that respect).
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,196 posts
 
But with these little footers it wasn’t all pros. I did find the sound became a bit less dense and palpable and punchy, a bit more elctrostatic-like. After several days I removed the footers and that sense of density and punch returned, though losing a bit of the other properties I mentioned with the footers. Though on balance if I had to choose, I liked the sound more with the speakers just on the floor. I seek density and palpability in sound and it’s hard to give up.
This impression is normal....I had the same impression with only 4 springs boxes under my speakers... I add another sets on top of the speakers with a damping load around 80 pound, them the TIMBRE become more meaty and way more natural.... The dyssemetric compression of the 2 sets of springs made all the difference in the world... Internal resonance of the speakers box was decreased ( one set is directly compressed by only the 80 pounds load and to the other one under the speakers is added the speaker weight)

I dont doubt tough that the Townshend platform will exceed my device in S.Q, because their fine engineering.... But that cost me 100 bucks and the effect is without negative now....Tuning the springs with the compressive force ask for finetuning around maximum 1 % of the compressing load... If not the effect will be negative like you describe.,..I did play then with listening experiments between  50 and 200 grams added or substracted to reach optimal compression....If you over compress or undercompress near the optimal point  the effect is very audible on instrument timbre and mid  bass frequencies...

My best to you....
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