2. misc-audio
  3. 190032-53619

For city apartment dweller audiophiles. Have you ever had neighbors banging on your walls?

I try to be considerate when I play my music but recently I put footers under the spikes of my speakers very highly recommended here. People claiming improvements in sound and a godsend when you need to move them to get behind certain components. I was listening to music and in the middle of a cut I paused my cd transport placed the new footers under the spikes and then I started the player without changing the volume. The music was noticeably louder and I had to turn it down.

Well two days after I was playing music at 8AM no louder than I've been playing it for years and I get banging on my bedroom wall. I listen in my living room so next to it is my bedroom and then the bedroom of my neighbor. The last time it happened was many many years ago and it wasn't music it was a man talking on FM radio. I sensed there was a change in the presence of the music with the new footers but that big of a difference? We have very good sound proofing here and there was a time when I could play Wagner at 5am before work and nobody complained.

Could footers make that much of a difference? I did notice an improvement in presence as well. I do not know this neighbor and she's been living here a few years.

Anybody else have a similar situation when they changed something in their system or maybe you were just playing music too loudly without realizing it?

 

roxy1927
roxy54's avatar
roxy54
8,009 posts
 

Their.

glennewdick's avatar
glennewdick
1,689 posts
 

Footer as in what type? Isolation or coupling? 

I used Isolation footers for years that helped with this issue quite a bit. Iso Acoustic's Gia's specifically. Coupling is not what you want to do for the people living around you. 

larryi
4,033 posts
 

Are you talking about spikes under your speakers or under an electrical component.  If it is an electrical component, I think the complaint is a coincidence.  It might be a real phenomenon with spikes under a speaker.

Spikes are intended to couple the speaker to the floor and will transmit MORE energy to the structure.  Most footers are intended to dissipate that energy and would reduce transmission to the structure.  If you somehow, by using both the spikes and footers, created a particular tuning of the resonance of your speaker set up such that the system is resonating at a frequency that is easily transmitted by the structure of the apartment and is particularly loud in the music you are playing, this might be the cause.  Try taking off the spikes and going with just the footers.  I still think it is somewhat unlikely that the spikes caused such a change that it was a cause of the complaint.  It is more likely a coincidence—your music playing happened to annoy your neighbor more than usually (she might have had a rough night trying to sleep and you woke her just as she was getting some shut eye).

larsman's avatar
larsman
1,979 posts
 

I live in an apartment and my experience with speakers and spikes is that spikes definitely transmit more bass energy through the floor. I have wall-to-wall carpeting and there is a foot of cement between floors, so I've lived here for 33 years and never heard anything from upstairs (except when contact is being made with their floor) or downstairs neighbors or the one wall that borders on another, and nobody has ever asked me to turn it down.

roxy1927 OP
134 posts
 

The spikes supporting the wooden base the speakers sit on. 

It's a pretty big coincidence because I had been playing music at that level for a few years from when she first moved in, early morning and in the evening, and it never had been a problem. If she had mentioned it to the super I would definitely have received a letter.

More to discover