Vibration isolation or absorption?

@jumia 

So don’t you want to draw that vibration away and channel it somehow into a bottomless pit. Shouldn’t the pointy things, aKA spikes, funnel the vibration onto A disc pucky thing that will make the vibration go away.

Why would you want to isolate vibration and have a rebound back-and-forth all over the place within a speaker, or component?

Audio is full of these apparently logical contradictions but upon closer inspection we usually find that one or another of our preconceptions is faulty.

This has happened to me many, many times. And not just in audio

First of all we should consider whether it is possible to channel away vibration with something as solid as a steel spike.

Or could it be that the spike actually couples the speaker cabinet to the supporting surface and sets up further resonating mechanisms?

Isolating vibration by decoupling fundamentally lowers both the resonant frequency and its strength between cabinet and surface.

Both of these are good things, especially when the resulting resonant frequency is lower than the bass output of the speaker. For example something like 20Hz, which most speakers can't get close to, would be good and anything lower would be even better.

I'm pretty sure that the Townshend devices go considerably lower than 20Hz.

For me, the missing piece in this puzzle is the notion of constrained layer damping. I've read that it's superior to using springs alone but I can't remember why that is so.

Perhaps someone could chime in with why CLD is theoretically considered superior?

Is vibration a two-way street?

So you have vibration from a speaker cabinet, but don't you also have vibration due to the sound waves bouncing around the room where the floor will vibrate and that vibration will transfer back into the speaker cabinet and also the component rack?

So maybe isolation is the answer?

For those of you wandering what the springs do, they suspend this speaker above the floor. He has the vibrations travel down through the springs in the springs convert vibrations into heat. The difference that they bring to a speaker is mainly in the base region. They separate the speaker from the floor so the sound that you hear are mainly just the ones produced by the speaker. You don’t get a secondary vibration from the floor and the walls which at higher listening levels makes the base less distorted and muddy. Mainly because you’ve got this buffer in between which creating the sound waves and the floor . It really does work, for some reason some people can’t imagine why it works but I promise you it does work. Maine saying that it does is cleaned up the base at higher listening levels. If you don’t like to crank up the volume then it’s not worth doing. 

@raysmtb1

I looked at your system and it appears you’re using the two channel McIntosh for one set of sneakers and monos for the other two. Have you ever tried biampin thing with the MC 275 for the mid/upper range drivers, and the monos for the bass.

You should provide details for the rest of your system. The rack you have is really nice that wood is awesome. Love the casters and they're carrying quite a load.

But, when the most expensive platform with the highest degree of damping was put under the CD player, the sound became too dry and analytical.  This was not just my conclusion, but everyone else thought the same, including the Symposium representative.  The idea that the "ideal" is the least amount of vibrational energy is not always the case and this goes with all components as well as room treatments. 

What this suggests is that the damping system had a flaw; perhaps something like the system was ineffective at a certain frequency.