What to place under large floorstanding speakers for best bass performance?
Where is more important than on what.
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I have a similar issue. I’ve tried various isolation footers, spikes, no spikes, nothing seems to work well.
agreed, but some of us have very limited flexibility on placement.
I’m not sure it’s the answer for everyone, but after bringing my Spendor D7.2 home with a set of Isoacoustics Gaia feet that was recommended by the audio store, I wasn’t expecting much but said I would try them.
The wife and I listened with the included feet and then the Gaia feet and the wife decided for me that we were not returning them. I highly recommend trying these or similar feet from other suppliers like Stack Audio.
It does depend on distance from wall etc but they made a realdifference
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will look at these.
I tried the Gaia, but didn’t like them in this room. I have a smaller room, and with smaller floor standers (Dali Oberon 5), and like them quite a bit in that system.
Fancy feet won’t fix speaker-room mismatch or poor placement.
Anyway, every speaker in every room on every floor will react differently to different feet. If the speaker cabinet itself is not constructed to dampen vibrations sufficiently, the interactions with any particular feet and floor will be rather unpredictable. I’d ask the speaker designer.
If you are lost, worth trying may be:
Some good old spikes.
Audioplan AntiSpikes can work very well in my experience and they are cheap. In addition, they are very convenient and make it easy to play with speaker positioning and achieve solid stable footing on uneven floors, which is maybe the biggest factor. But make sure to follow the instructions precisely.
IsoAcoustics (Gaia or others) as well as Townshend platforms may be worth trying.
But you may also want to try some cheap Sorbothane pads from Amazon or pieces of old carpet to make sure you don’t fall into an audiophile bias trap.
On some floors, with some speakers, stone slabs may help, maybe in addition to spikes for instance. I’m partial to slate for various reasons (cheap, looks good, dense, fine-grained and hence no pronounced resonant frequency).
With all options, consider that changing the height also changes the tweeter position relative to ears. Again, depends on the specific speakers.
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I have these Dali’s in another room
I do not use anything with them, but they made a huge difference with with the Spendors, as these have a lot more Bass than the Dali’s.
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If bass is boomy, placement of speaker and listener position along with digital room correction (MUSE in Roon with some measurements to create a convolution filter) will be the most helpful path.
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Moving the speakers a bit further out from the wall and using Muse to reduce a little bass, alongside the Gaia made a huge difference. Muse is pretty cool for this purpose, though I did use Dirac as well but was not really happy with the results from that
From my very own experience I’d very much recommend floorstanding speakers with front or sub bass tubes. Avoid back firing ones. I compared several speakers. And the differences were always pretty obvious, even if not placed in corners.
I also have limited space, and to get a proper stereo triangle both speakers need to be in the room’s corners with one to two feet away from the walls.
I also experimented with different speaker feet and stayed with rubber like ones on hard floor for convenience. I couldn’t hear a difference between rubber and spikes anyway.
I’d think we can safely trust in Floyd E. Toole’s expertise, given in his 4th edition of Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers, Rooms and Headphones, recommending isolation rather than any form of coupling to whatever the floor is made of.
Safe serious $$$, i.e. by using Sorbothane calculators to find appropriate dimensioning for your specific speakers.
As others noted already, firstly optimize listener/speaker placement and room acoustics, then apply considerate DSP to make up for the lion’s share in taming bass response.
Good point. I suggest these: https://www.supplyhouse.com/Bluefin-VPE-300-E-V-A-Anti-Vibration-Pad-3-x-3-x-7-8. Used them with my previous speakers.
I have these now, not bad but IĘĽm looking for something better.
In what way are they inadequate (other than in appearance)?
Wanted something to make speakers sit higher off floor
Everyone has been putting out ideas but the requirements were really poorly defined. It would have been good if you had said this right away:
Why?
I think they would sound better
I figured that your plan is not to make it sound worse. There’s really no way to make any useful recommendations this way, unless very generic ones as above
If you just want to raise your speakers for “better” sound you should mainly look for the tweeters being roughly at the height of your ears. This may help if they are not at that height already.
You may also tilt your speakers a bit for that matter.
And if it’s mainly about a rather boomy and imprecise bass you may also experiment with bass plugs.