Decoupling Speakers So Many Options?

Cone/Spike Decoupling Gliders, Threaded Stud Gliders, and Little/Giant Fat Gliders will help to hold the speaker cabinet and baffle steadier, reducing distortion. The idea is to keep the baffle that the speakers are mounted to as motionless as possible for the cones to render the music most accurately. I have had the speakers stood on spikes directly on the carpet with the spikes going into the floor. The floor is concrete block and beam construction, with foam insulation on top and then a layer of chip board, so effectively a stiff suspended floor. I found that as the Wilson Benesch Vectors have downward firing ports that placing them on the Oak platforms improved the bass, detail and depth. The goal of spikes under your speakers is to decouple them from the next surface.

A suspended wooden floor will re-radiate late and spectrally incoherent - a temporally and harmonically unrelated growl, all the time. Microphones are not spiked but rather are decoupled in most instances in order to accurately capture the original pressure changes without interference from external sources. You are again mistaking the pressure changes at the diaphragm of the microphone with the pressure changes caused by the reproducing equipment.

Try to wiggle the speaker cabinet and at best you will just scratch the top plat of the stand. Spike feet do not have much capacity to absorb and reduce speaker driver-generated cabinet vibrations. Much of the vibration that causes a lot of distortion is higher-frequency, acute micro-vibration that you cannot really feel or readily detect. DBNeutralizer very effectively arrests these vibrations as well as a considerable amount of the more 'macro'- type vibrations. The Gliders also eliminate speaker-generated floorborne vibrations that can affect your other audio components.

The basic idea is to stop anything that the speaker is touching from vibrating. Speakers should particularly be decoupled from surfaces that resonate audibly or hollow surfaces which act kind of like an acoustic guitar body and amplify resonant frequencies themselves. Best solution ever was screwing the speakers tightly to the stands. Anchoring gave best result in deminishing cabinet resonance and general loss of efficiency due to speakers wasting energy to move back and forward slightly. In my case my old, very old, Nexus 6 stands were wobbly and nothing I did like tightening screws etc had much of an impact. I was having an issue with the bass on my LS50's on certain tracks at louder volumes.

Much more than each little movement when your pet is laying down on your lap with all of its weight spread out over a much larger surface area. So it's the exact same principle at work when you use spikes/cones/feet beneath your speakers. With spikes in place, the weight of your speakers being applied through only those four very small points means that those points "dig" much deeper into the surface beneath them. Therefore, if you use a smaller surface area for the points of studio monitor stands contact, all of that gravitational force is now being exerted via that much smaller surface area.

Just how far you need to decouple is best judged by listening. One good indication could be how well the bass is playing notes after some decoupling. For example soft rubber pads/foam will decouple more than hard ones, but both will decouple hundreds of times better than wood on metal. Walking across a room, or simi going by, the floor shaking, is different than a speaker introducing bass harmonics. Both shake, both vibrate, both are bad, but they are not the same. The Western response to the pandemic has unveiled how fragile our liberal international order is under stress.