DIY speaker isolation base for a wood floor

The argument for isolating speakers from structural vibration. isolation is a two way street. ↕️

“Max Townshend has a theory as to why they have so much effect and that’s that micro tremors in the ground are greater in amplitude than the amount of movement in a loudspeaker cone. I wrote about it here a couple of years ago but essentially there is a continuous movement in the ground produced by the earth itself and increased by factors like road traffic and even sea waves. This might seem far fetched but it’s difficult to establish why isolating a speaker should be quite as beneficial as it is. In my system the equipment is supported on a similar isolation system, so it’s not as if you are reducing the amount of vibration getting to the hardware. Townshend’s demonstrates this effect by putting tablet computers on two identical speakers, each device running an app that reveals vibration at different frequencies. One speaker is spiked the other on a Seismic Podium, all you have to do is tap the floor with your foot to see how much the spiked speaker moves, and conversely how still the isolated one stays. And if music is played through another system the spiked speaker vibrates but the isolated one doesn’t, so one reason why isolation helps is that the music itself vibrates the floor and creates a low level form of feedback.”

If the room us vibrating the walls are already enormous speakers.


When the woofer is already moving way more from say turntable rumble and your music is riding on top of that, does seismic motion matter? Seismic motion us predominantly <10 Hz and quickly drops off from their to 200hz, opposite to the Fletcher Munson curves so seismic movement would need to be more substantial to be an issue but again, the giant speaker walls are going to be orders of magnitude more an issue.

Goeffkait, can you use that expertise and review my math wrt the spring resonance for the OP?


Blueranger, what is the spring constant of the new springs (57 lb rated)?   As your platforms are not overly large, shorter springs as well would be "safer" due to less angular movement (say if you bang into them).

I know an engineer and he has restaurant clients that have him calculate how often that they need to tighten the screws on a ceiling mounted beer mug holder that you typically see in a bar.

The reason for this is primarily vibrations from vehicle traffic. If the screws aren't periodically tightened, then the beer mug rack will eventually come crashing down. Based on this example, I'd say vibration issues is a real thing.