Many products will decouple and/or isolate, but this is a complex interface with many variables:

the speaker design and construction

whether it responds to decoupling, or to best coupling

the several floor/building constructions you may experience

you may get better mid transparency and loose some timing

you may get more tuneful bass and loose slam and attack

you may get deeper images and loose mid dynamics and expression

.............do not jump to conclusions: 'wow I have made a difference'

Try to assess the whole sound picture, the quality of musical experience

before rushing to a concluson

Martin Colloms

Townshend do supply a setting up instruction sheet which covers the basics.

But i found care has to be taken in setting up to get the best from them.

First thing to note is that on a carpet with underlay the feet do sink in quite a bit, obviously depends on the weight of speaker. That then brings the underside of the podium very close to the carpet, which i was concerned about. To prevent that the feet can be adjusted to give extra clearance. But then you can find when you put the speaker on, depending on its weight distribution, you may have to further adjust the feet, until you find you run out of adjustment. You can adjust the load pod knob to set them for the desired speakers and to level the speaker. But i found we had to level one speaker, my floor does have a low spot in just the wrong place - sods law, quite a lot with one of the cells. That then reduce the free movement in that corner.

So persevered and with a bit of time and patience i did manage to get it level and freely moving. The other podium was a doddle.

It is interesting to observe the quite notable ignorance surrounding this subject. Some companies seem to regard spikes as isolation; others as coupling. Little wonder that *tweaks* such as these have such a bad reputation when vendors evidently have such a poor grasp of even the fundamentals of what it is they are selling.

Edited by user 31 July 2020 20:15:47(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Simon

There are higher load capacity feet too, called Gaia-Titan. But they are of course even more expensive, from about £900 per set I think?

You're probably right, Kevin, but actually they're probably both isolation *and* coupling, at different frequencies. Feed that into the marketing BS generator and, well, here we are.

I must admit, as someone who (in previous houses) used to religiously spike his speakers through the carpets into the concrete floors beneath, I've never really bought into the explanations (even though I did it, 'cos I am - or was - a flat earther at heart). I'm sure we've all had the experience of carefully setting up the spikes into the concrete floor, making sure the speaker is steady, and so on. A few weeks later, it's been bashed with the hoover, elbowed on the way to open and close the curtains behind it, had the cats jump on it, and so on. And you touch it and what a surprise, you can feel some movement. The spike has ground away a bit of the concrete dust and suddenly it's not as solid as you thought it was...

Three legs like a milking stool and you might have a chance at a vaguely consistent spike/concrete floor interface; four legs, not a chance...

So at low frequencies (a few hertz) your speaker may well be solidly coupled to the floor via its spikes, whereas at a few kilohertz I reckon it'll be completely free to move - isolated from the floor - as the spikes jiggle about in the concrete dust, restrained only by the weave of the carpet...

So I suspect that in situations where your spikes are interfacing directly with a concrete floor, almost any device that brings some controllability and repeatability to that interface will make a significant difference, certainly to the week-to-week consistency of the sound. Whether that difference is positive is of course another matter.

Now there's an idea for me to try four of the heavier duty models for my new design which will weigh approx. 200 kgs each speaker?

Many thanks for the isolators

Now the fun begins

I use the Townshend speaker bars for one of my speaker sets and a podium for my turntable. Works very well for me, a quality product with the results I wanted.