why spikes under speakers???

Ok, maybe 'drain' was the wrong word, 'transfer' might be more accurate. Please take a minute to consider this experience I had.
A friend had a TT that had three relatively flat aluminum cones that served as feet. The flat side makes contact with the flat bottom of the turntable. The turntable sits an a welded target stand. He put on a classical lp and during a loud passage that had a lot of bass the cartridge mistracked. He said, "that never happened before". I checked the cone footers and found that he had absentmindedly put them facing up, not down. We flipped them over and replayed the passage. Of course the tracking problems were gone. You could feel with your fingers a huge difference when you touched the TT base. We removed the cones and placed the TT on a folded over towel and tried it again. We could feel more vibration in the TT base than when the cones were under it (correctly).
This (unscientific) experiment suggests to me that the cones do more than isolate the TT base, they 'transfer' the 'airborn' vibration that the base was picking up from the music to the target stand. After seeing that the TT would mistrack when the cones were upside down, and not when the TT sat on a towel, it would be hard to argue that the cones were not 'transfering' energy from the stand to the TT base.
I dont understand why it is so hard to imagine that it is possible for vibration to be transfered from one object to another. If its just 'isolation' thats taking place, where does the energy go?

Hey TWL has left the game and thats a bad thing .... Eat beans and gather round the campfire and continue the storytelling..I'm leaving before the swamp gas rises anymore. Regards..the other Tom

You wrote:

This (unscientific) experiment suggests to me that the cones do more than isolate the TT base, they 'transfer' the 'airborn' vibration that the base was picking up from the music to the target stand. After seeing that the TT would mistrack when the cones were upside down, and not when the TT sat on a towel, it would be hard to argue that the cones were not 'transfering' energy from the stand to the TT base.
I dont understand why it is so hard to imagine that it is possible for vibration to be transfered from one object to another. If its just 'isolation' thats taking place, where does the energy go?

I write:

Oh there is no arguing that "some" of the energy can and is tranfered, but that is not what is causing the difference.

First off cones don't generally "isolate", they "couple".

Setting the TT on a towel "isolates" the TT from the stand, and allows the airborne vibration to have a larger effect on it.

Setting it on cones, creates a mechanical "coupling" to the mass of the stand, and reduces the affects of the air borne energy, by increasing the "mass" seen by that energy.

My "key" point was this "draining" verbiage. Like each cone or spike is a drain and vibration runs down them like water from a sink. That is an incorrect and silly notion.

The interesting thing in audio is 1/2 the time is spent creating beautiful "vibrations" and the other half is spent "fighting" damamaging vibrations.

Eldartford, nice summary! 1st law - can't win. Conservation of energy and mass or zero sum or a tie.
2nd law - entropy can only increase, therefore no "break-even". No comment on drainage systems, sewers not being my expertise!
Salut, Bob P.

I bought a pair of used KEF 104/2s that have threaded recepticles on the botttom. I assume that they have been used with some type of spike. What brands of spikes do you folks prefer, and are threads universal? The floor has medium pile carpet.

db