Under my tower speakers -- Isoacoustics Gaia, other options?

Hi Hilde,

I have a pair of Focal Sopra 2 driven by a Hegel H390.  I had the GAIA feet under them for a couple of years, for a while driven by an H360.  Before that I used spikes.  Hardwood floor.  Something about the system always seemed lacking to me.  The highs were there but not "clear" or "precise" which made no sense to me as those beryllium tweeters are super fast .  Mids were a bit smeared, bass sounded deep and fine, to the depth they go anyway.

On a whim, almost impulse buy, I bought the Townshend Bars, as the regular stands are too big for the location of the speakers.  The impact has been shockingly transformative.  The weirdest thing is how much better the beryllium tweeters sound.  Mids have lost the smear, vocals are richer and more defined and while I thought the bass was fine, turns out I was wrong.  But it's much better now. 

I think what the Townshends do is prevent the floor from becoming energized by the speaker.  When the floor becomes energized it becomes another speaker in the room, and a rather poor one at that.  So while my speakers were actually doing a great job on their own, by the time the sound got to my ears, 10-20 feet away, it had been stepped all over by the crappy sound being generated by my floor "speakers ".  At least that's my hypothesis. 

I know the Townshends are a bit pricey, but they are easily one of the best tweaks I've ever made.   

Looking at some threads on Ascend’s website I found that my speakers came with spikes. Trying to locate all 8 of them:

In my old place I had a sub on carpet which was on top of concrete, it was a basement listening space. For years, I had the sub on a guitar amp stand, I think it was called an Auralex Gramma. That helped tighten the bass up from having the sub off the floor, I was happy with that for years.

My curiosity got the best of me and I tried some Townshend bars under the sub and I was pretty shocked at just how much faster/tighter my bass got. More articulate, pretty much all the audiophile buzzwords could be used here to describe the difference in sound. I can sum it up this way, the bars enhanced my listening enjoyment by quite a lot. I won’t be without some type of stand/footer underneath my speakers/subs moving forward.

Good luck in your search! I hope whatever you try gets you to enjoy listening to your system more than before.

@drack1 Thanks for the tips!

@surfcat Thanks for relaying your experience. Your floors are hardwood and mine are concrete on the basement level. They are very very solid. So, I'm not sure whether your experience will translate much for me. That said, I'm getting a lot of good information about Townshend, here. It's still too costly given the cost of my speakers, but I'm mulling it a bit.