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 (And I think that Adam Smith’s ideas are long out of date, having been surpassed by managerial capitalism, advanced capitalism, and whatever is en vogue at this University of Chicago these days.)