Isoacoustics Orea vs Townshend Seismic Pod on Components


I installed a set of Isoacoustics Gaia 2s on my speakers about a month ago and was extremely pleased with them. I'm now curious about the Oreas.

My components are currently placed on a good rack with Finite Elemente Cerabase footers at the bottom of the rack. I was wondering if individual isolators such as the Orea or Seismic Pod placed under components can further improve sound quality. I've read contradictory comments about the Orea. Some say they brought an appreciable difference when placed under components such as DAC or amplifiers. Some say they bring nothing to the sound, zero difference.

I would appreciate experiences on the Isoacoustics Orea or the Townshend Seismic Pod, or the comparison between the two products. The Oreas look better than the Pods to me although the latter may be costlier.
ryder

You can post your own pictures on a site like ImgPile.com (which I use) and then once you've entered a picture/photo, use your right click to copy image address and then paste it into the URL space provided by the image caption above and click on OK to see it and make any adjustments you need to. The rest is self explanatory. Hope that helps.

All the best,
Nonoise

Post removed 

lets see if this works

PS: forget about it.. I clicked the picture icon, entered the google link and nothing shows up...

@ryder I have been in the USA for a few weeks with not much work to do so I have spent a lot of time measuring different platforms.

The Isoacoustic product i.e. Orea and Gaia provide almost unmeasurable improvement, the $34 for 4 Nobsound are about 3.8 times better, than either of the Isoacoustic products,  the Podiums/Pods are about 18 times better than the Nobsound and the Crest Audio are about 1.8 times better than the podiums.

The big thing with the Crest audio from Switzerland, is that they are not available for all speakers and weights as the Podiums and Pods.

I made sonic measurements using calibrated microphones, REW and laser traces.

When I say better I mean the Isoacoustics products do not do anything of significance to sonically diminish decay, coherency, RT60, RT60 decay, clarity, distortion or impulse in my room with my Kensington speakers and tube amps.

For some reason, this forum software is not liking my links so I can't post pictures of my measurements so you will have to trust me or you can join the Pathos group in Facebook and see a couple of them there.

Some could question the room setup, etc. etc. but this is a black box type of experiment. you input the same sound frequency sweep to the same room, same everything but the isolation mechanisms and measure the difference. 

My house is made of wood and plaster, with hardwood flooring sitting on car-decking (I have no clue what type of wood this is but it is thick and bendy), I believe this is how most homes are built in the US. I would imagine that my home is not much different than most homes in the US.

To say that these type of homes are far from ideal for sound is the biggest understatement I have made in the last few years :) so in theory a great environment to test.

For example. I will average decays because I do not have time to go and type each frequency decay number. 

Spikes for frequencies between 25Hz to 10K the decay average is about 603ms. 

Isoacoustic Orea for frequencies between 25Hz to 10K the decay average is about 561ms

 Isoacoustic Gaia for frequencies between 25Hz to 10K the decay average is about 542ms.

NobSound for frequencies between 25Hz to 10K the decay average is about 389ms.

Podiums for frequencies between 25Hz to 10K the decay average is about 139ms

Without pictures is hard to visualize the decay effects, but imagine a piano note that is supposed to linger for 20ms but lingers for 400ms+ and so on, then the silence disappears and with it the music.   

I am not saying that every room/speaker/isolation mechanism will react the same as mine room, I am just saying that in my environment in the USA with this gear these are the measurable effects of each platform.  

For example my decay in one of the rooms in my home in Spain with spikes is 227ms still a LOT for $100K speakers, but I cant wait until I put some podiums or pods, with the Kensington $20K the decay on spikes is 338ms on the same room as where I have my good speakers. 

I have no affiliation, I get nothing from any of them except the products I pay for as everyone else does. My intent is solely to share my measurements.

I love math!

 

Ryder, Vibration control of all kinds whether ordinary plain springs, Nobsound, Townshend or whatever, generally is more effective resting directly under the component chassis than under the foot that comes on the component. Works better, looks better. The loading per spring is what makes the difference in sound, not so much where they are under the component. So you can use 3 or 4, and they can be moved around to balance the load. I use for example 4 Pods under my amp but almost all the weight is transformers in the back. So I have one each back corner, one sort of in the middle, and a 4th center front. 

Ordinary springs like Nobsound are more sensitive to loading. They tend to sound full and warm when compressed a lot, thin and extended when not loaded enough. I think the reason Nobsound vary so much is partly they are short, and this gives them a smaller optimal range, and partly they are not damped, and this gives resonance free reign.

Townshend Pods and Podiums solve both of these shortcomings with a single larger and higher quality (piano wire) spring and bellows air shock damping. Works great, as so many have found.

astralfor, Crest? I think you got the name wrong. There is a Swiss company Credo that imported Townshend Podiums 20 years ago and then copied that old version. If they are 1.8X better than current production Podiums that would be quite the trick seeing as they are knockoffs of an older version of the same thing. Either that or you really like their toothpaste.