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Speaker spikes-worse sound-what gives?

I recently bought a pair of Silverline Sonata lls and set them up in my family room (20x20. After some weeks of finding good positioning, I screwed in the spiked feet that came with them only to find a very different and somewhat worse sound. The base not only tightened but really became thin although the top end opened up a bit. The live sounding D. Krall now sounds like she is coming out of a box. The room is heavily carpeted wall to wall. The rear wall has cedar planking on it. The one wall that has windows is covered with heavy drapes and honeycomb shades.

I know the easy answer is to take them out, but I thought that spiked feet always improved the sound.

What gives?

rest of system is EAD Ovation, Aragon 8008 amp, Moon Nova CDP. (System is a little bright but not harsh. Tried using Red Dawn ICs and speaker cable but made it too bright, harsh and analytical. Before the spikes)
jeffg

Showing 2 responses by hdm

hdm
1,055 posts
 
I would bet a fair bit of money that your carpet is over a suspended hardwood floor or plywood subfloor. Forget about the spikes, buy two pieces of Laminated or "Security" glass with a slightly larger footprint than your speakers, placing your speakers on top of the glass, preferably with vibrapods or Herbie's "Tenderfeet" between the glass and the speakers. You will be happy.
hdm
1,055 posts
 
As Pmkalby points out, never is there an always. Your experience mirrors mine exactly, and from the reading I've done here and on Audioasylum, a fair number of people with floorstanders on suspended floors. Spiking the speaker to such a floor, as opposed to decoupling it, results in a significant degradation of the sound in my opinion. With the speaker spiked to such a floor, you can actually place your hand on top of it while playing and feel a ton of "vibration", for lack of a better word, that simply is not there with the speaker decoupled from the floor with something like vibrapods. And the sound with spikes, as you noted, can be pretty grim. It's as though all the flow and life has been sucked out of the music, with the bass being thinned out, the midrange being pushed forward and the highs being overly emphasized. You will probably have many suggestions here with respect to placing concrete pavers, or granite slabs, etc. under the speaker and then spiking the speaker to those. That may work as well, but what I like about the approach I've outlined above is that the laminated glass is 1) very thin so that it does not raise the speaker and the drivers into a very high position that may do more harm than good 2) it is, because of its construction quite inert and acoustically dead and 3) it is cosmetically unobtrusive.

I am currently using vibrapods between the glass and the speakers, but am tempted to try the Herbie's product because of very good performance from another one of his products. It may be worthwile to go with some other type of footer as well, but what I've described is fairly inexpensive and sounds quite good. I'm pretty cheap.
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