IsoAcoustics Gaia Footers AND Townshend Seismic Podiums
This might sound counterintuitive, but has anyone tested whether having IsoAcoustics Gaia footers ON TOP of Townshend podiums make any improvement, or at least do not degrade the sonics compared to using the Townshend podiums on their own?
I just got the Townshend podiums and already have Gaia I footers on my T+A Solitaire S 530 speakers. I am too lazy to go back to the stock feet so now I have the Gaia between the speaker and the podiums.
I’ve seen a lot of discussions of IsoAcoustics and Townshend in the same thread but have yet to come across anyone who has tried using both at the same time.
I just received a response from John Hannant who is the primary dealer for Townshend that the Isoacoustics footers will degrade the performance of the Podiums. Interesting! But I had a feeling that could be the case as two decouplers could have an adverse effect, similar to what @milpai describes with Nikon VR lenses. @thyname “Truly out of the box thinking” totally got me! It was just the case of sheer laziness. Now I suppose I will need to remove the Gaia, which makes more work for me! |
I saw this a few days ago posted on elsewhere on this site. It leads me to believe there should be zero harm in using both the gaia footers and the TA platforms. This is an interesting read, The theory of more stuff. Vibration isolation in audio is a subject surrounded in mystery half truths and any number of wild theories. As an engineering exercise, the explanation is quite straight foreword and may be explained by the“Theoryof more stuff”. Take a surface, be it the floor or a table, on which your hi fi component is placed and it is desired to reduce the vibration from thesupport to the equipment. The way this is done is to put “some stuff” between theequipment and the supporting surface. There are three possible outcomes. 1 The vibration in the equipment is more than the vibration in the support. This is not possible as if it were; the energy crisis would be solved! More out than what is put in. Free power forever! Unfortunately, this scenario contradicts the first and second laws ofthermodynamics, so is not possible. 2 The vibration in the supported equipment will be the same as in the case of no stuff. Thechances of this are one in a million because something has been changed… it may be thesame, but that is extremely unlikely, therefore, the only possibility is, 3 The vibration will be attenuated, to a greater or lesser degree, and this is the case. There are many products out there that do in fact attenuate vibration. Be it spikes on glass, wood and slate, aluminium spikes in cups, ball bearings in cups, solid plates separated by compliant sheets, lead, Bluetack, sand, marble, concrete, the list is endless. It is also known that multiple combinations of theabove produce better results because there is morestuff. E.g. multiple platforms stacked really high. |
@musicaddict The way I’m trying to make sense of it is that both of these solutions (Isoacoustics and Townshend Podiums) are decoupling solutions, which are a bit different from damping or typical absorption solutions. With decoupling, my understanding is that the vibration that comes from the speaker is isolated from the floor and vice versa, but there is also an inverse physical reaction that comes from the decoupling mechanism to counter what comes from either end and attempts to stabilize or minimize the resonances in the speaker. It may be that the inverse resonance control that the Townshend Podiums may not accurately counter back to the speaker because it is decoupled by the Gaia footers. In this case, the Gaia footers are supposedly the “weak link” in the chain. Perhaps @townshend-audio can validate or correct this hypothesis. |
