First impressions of the Isoacoustic Gaia 1’s

@ronboco Hey Ron, I've heard that argument from a local dealer against the idea of isolation/de-coupling and used in favor of coupling. The argument in favor of de-coupling is that the environment affects the speakers (or components) negatively, and that an isolation solution protects against those environmental affects. 

I know that high-end recording studios will using floating floors to isolate against environmental impacts. I believe Townsend's website has their philosophy on it--something about small tectonic shifts on the other side of the world measurably affecting your HiFi if I recall. Make of that what you will. 

With all the positive recommendations here from people who have isolated, I would recommend trying it if you haven't already. 

This is my experience too. I picked up some used B&W’s and sat them directly on the wood floor because the seller didn’t has the stock spikes. I went with Herbie’s Stud Gliders because $150 was more my speed and because these won’t be my forever speakers. The subwoofer saw a similar, dramatic improvement. This tweak is more than just a tweak.

In my limited experience, the only other tweaks that made this big of a difference were a reclocker between the streamer and DAC and a fiber optic run to isolate the HiFi from the dirty side of the network.

@bdp24 Thanks for the Pods recommendation. I’ll probably look there first once I have endgame speakers to keep costs down. It would be nice if this forum had more features like emojis and threads. It would go a long way to help the conversation. 

@ronboco

I guess if there is a negative to decouple the positive must out weigh it.

That’s a good way to say it. So many advancements in engineering (and life) are still tradeoffs, but with an overall net gain.

I’m not certain what the best solution might be for your basement with carpet over concrete. My home theater space has tile floors (for now), and my HiFi space has wood floors. In both cases, I felt decoupling the sub and speakers made a big improvement. While one way of describing the the effect of decoupling is that the bass "dropped off noticeably," I would also add that in my experience, the bass still pressurized the room the same and the sound became dramatically more transparent. When coupled, my walls and floor where activated, and the sound was very muddy as a result. While plenty of people in car audio and at concerts seem to want to "feel" the bass, I would argue that lots of resolution and imaging was lost in my case and that the sound became higher quality on net in my rooms. A concrete slab might be different though.