I have a couple of questions for you.
Without springs the cabinet causes the floor to vibrate. This vibration manifests as ringing that can be seen on a seismograph. It also manifests as a blurring of image focus and harmonic coloring that can be heard.
Are we to believe speakers ring in the sub-hertz regions and this noise actually transcends into audible noise that the human ear easily detects?
No. The smearing and ringing is very much in the normal audio band.
The sub region thing comes from springs working down to very low frequency. How low depends on spring and load. The goal with our systems is to get it down to below where it matters for us, somewhere in the low single digits something like that.
"Ringing" is sort of a metaphor for a whole host of vibrations. It starts with the voice coil and driver. These excite the baffle and speaker cabinet. The speaker cabinet excites the floor, which in turn excites the walls and everything else.
None of this is a one-way street. Watch the Ledermann video for a great illustration of how vibrations travel up and down back and forth in complex patterns. "Ringing" is shorthand for this complex network of patterns.
The big benefit of springs, be they Townshend or Nobsound or whatever, is they allow the speaker alone to dissipate all this energy. This happens a lot faster with a speaker cabinet than a whole room. It is real easy, and pretty darn impressive, to do this and hear just how big a difference this makes.
I have always had the understanding that Sound Pressure Levels were the culprit that vibrates flooring and not speaker systems.
Yes and why can’t it be both? Surely it is. The mechanical aspect of it is however a lot more than people think. Heard it at my place, heard it even more dramatically at Brandon Wade’s recently. Mechanical transmission is huge. Have to hear it to believe it.
