Speakers : Spikes on Hard Floor / Ceramic Floor

Nope. I use Artesania Feet which have cups in them. The speakers have spikes that sit in the cups. The Vivid’s are somewhat annoying as they use six feet. Bah.

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I had my Canton Vento floorstanding speakers on spikes on our concrete floor that rests on sand and clay. Directly on spikes effected the upper midrange and actually canceled bass frequencies. Added a 2” granite, perfectly planar polished below the speakers with felt pads below them and the entire sound spectrum improved.

That set is now replaced by stand mount speakers that rest on a hardwood tripod on rubber and felt feet. I never experienced a more realistic sound.

Spikes, can look really cool, especially those on Sonus Faber Olympica speakers. Replacing them with something like Isoacoustics Gaia’s (which shapes remind me of hand grenades) would be a nearly impossible compromise to esthetics. Luckily I did not spend Sonus Faber Olympica budget, so I had no issues with esthetics.

I love the sound from speakers on absorbers.

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Here’s an interesting vid on speaker placement. Nothing unknown but all of the decisions are well explained. At the end he mentions spikes on concrete only otherwise use isolation between the speaker or stand and floor. I like the way he does his videos.

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If spikes de make sense, only if you have 3 of them. With 4 spikes ore more, one of them will always “dance”, ie. Will not have sufficient weight distributed to it for solid contact. Ultimately resulting in loose contact to the floor and causing more trouble than good. No matter how precise and smooth you can adjust them, the problem will always remain.
That problem is much less with flexible material absorbers and disappears with speakers that stand on 3 spikes.

The Townshend platforms are another option.

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I have been doing some research on the platforms and they also seem like a great solution.
I haven’t figured out yet if they are springs or elastomer based. It looks like springs inside of a rubber boot.
Either way I think they would work. They are another device that never come up on the used market and that’s usually a good indicator.

I see them very rarely on the used market. But recently I have seen two:

The largest size is the ones that would work with my 1000-40’s but after putting the GAIA’s on them I almost think they sounded better with the casters instead. :thinking:
It will be a week or three before I get back to listening again.

Once again… This is an insane hobby. :wink:

Casters over footers, who would have predicted that?

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For sure. Once I get back in the mode I am going to remove the GAIA’s and put the wheels back on to verify.

As another WTF moment my Acoustic Zen’s sounded best with a towel between them and the floor. I was using a towel to be able to slide them around easily and once they were perfectly located I put the GAIA’s under them and I swear they were better sounding on towels. Hmmmmm.

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My Tidal Piano Cera speakers came with simple stainless steel “Ceraball” type footers, a single 1cm. bearing in a base cup with a cap. I replaced them with Stillpoints SS footers and they noticeably increased resolution. However, they did have a tendency to highlight the high frequencies a bit too much for my taste. I experimented with various interleaving layers of material between the Stillpoints and the granite platforms the speakers rest on. I ended up with a thin four layer constrained layer sandwich of 1/8" mahogany and two thin 80 durometer rubber sheets encasing thin hard felt. That dialed in the tonal balance perfectly to my tastes. (I suspect granite has less than perfect resonance characteristics for that application but I need to be able to move the speakers without scratching up the floors. The bottom of the granite platforms are covered with hard felt to facilitate moving.) I eventually want to get a pair of multi-element platforms from Adona audio racks to replace the ones I’m using now. https://www.adonacorporation.com/multi-element.html

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Not surprised, really…

Every system is different.

I did not like the Gaias between speaker base (maple butcher blocks) and carpeted floor, better than the spikes they replaced.

But I did appreciate an improvement when I placed the Gaias between the speakers and the base and left the spikes (and cups) between the speaker base and floor.

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It’s easy to forget that we are essentially sitting inside the “speaker” (the room with all of its idiosyncrasies) and being an organic system results are very hard to predict and easily upset by seemingly small changes.

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Yep i use iso on my sopra 2 concrete and tiles …big difference n very noticeable :notes::notes:

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