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Coupling/Decoupling Electronics

All the posts I’m making are due to my recent purchase of KEF LS50s and my attempts to optimize them. I’m now the first to admit that little changes make a big difference. At 12” from the wall behind then, the bass gets a little muddy. At 13”, I get nice reinforcement without any muddiness. A couple of weeks ago, if you had told me that an inch would make a difference, you’d get a very skeptical look. 

Inevitably, I wandered into the coupling/decoupling, spikes/pads battle. After much reading and a lot of lessons in physics-lite, I have determined that there are too many variables at work—speakers, stands, carpets, floors—for any kind of blanket statement to be made. 

There seems to be less controversy about electronics. The word is: Isolate! Those same speakers that are producing so much vibration are a deleterious force. We must do our best to keep those vibrations away from our finely tuned electronics. 

So here is my question: Don’t electronics produce their own vibration? CDs spin, amplifiers amp. Lots of energy being produced. Like speakers, is isolating them from the world around the right thing to do? Shouldn’t that energy inside the boxes be passed off, as speaker energy is passed off by spikes?


I suspect that, like the speaker question, there’s too many variables at play for a simple answer but I thought I’d ask.


Here’s another, more mystifying question. I just traded up from KEF Q150s. Black ones can be had for $300 from Amazon. White ones—the identical speaker—are out of stock everywhere and cost $5-$600 if you can track down a pair. This seems not to be an example of an efficient market, as Adam Smith might define it. (I’m not complaining. I had white ones.) (And I think that Adam Smith’s ideas are long out of date, having been surpassed by managerial capitalism, advanced capitalism, and whatever is en vogue at this University of Chicago these days.)
paul6001

Showing 2 responses by paul6001

paul6001 OP
98 posts
 
Just a few remarks to hopefully finalize this discussion. The effects of speaker spikes seems relatively straightforward but it really is remarkable how often it’s misunderstood. The effects of spikes is to couple the speaker to the floor on which it stands, the theory being that the energy produced by the speaker travels down through the spike into the floor, which being a much larger, usually stronger material than the speaker, can dissipate it more easily than the speaker alone. Thus we see the real nuts, I mean the strongly motivated audiophiles trying to drill down and plant their spikes in a concrete floor. 

Concrete regards a little buzzing from a speaker to be a minor annoyance, like a fly buzzing around. The concrete makes short work of speaker energy. (Citations omitted because it’s late but they would fill many pages.)


As to the equipment, the consensus seems to be that energy is produced and that the best way to handle it is to isolate the component with pads, springs, or whatever. That’s what I was planning to do. I wonder, though, whether I’ll hit the same problem common to people who tried to isolate speakers. They found that the cushioning and the ability to shed energy by rocking back and forth on the pads caused the music to sound lifeless Particularly in the upper registers, if I remember correctly. 

Well, there’s always something to worry about. I’ll know the answer when I try inserting some (not cheap) sorbothane pads.
paul6001 OP
98 posts
 
And the OP makes his final statement:


When I first got my new (used) LS50s, I plunked them down on the stands where the old speakers used to stand. They sounded great. 

Since then I’ve tried every tweak possible including moving them 1/4 inch in every possible direction, putting pennies under the spikes, using sorbothane pads under the feet of the electronics, turning the speakers to face Mecca, on and on. 

Nothing worked. I’m quite relieved that removing the sorbothane brought the life back to the system that had so completely been removed. Once again, Morrissey sounds like Morrissey. So much thought, so much work, so many posts only to realize that everything—EVERYTHING—I had been monkeying around with was only doing harm. 

It was all fun, in a certain sense, but the bottom line is that NAD knows what they’re doing. If their stuff sounded better on mushy feet, they would have put it on mushy feet. If I had bought a Ferrari, would I have spent two weeks trying to outdo the Ferrari mechanics? Probably. But I’m sure that I would have learned the same lesson that I just did: Let the pros do their thing then sit back and enjoy what I just spent all that money on. If I wanted to tinker, I should have bought one of those kits from Radio Shack.
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