Isoacoustics Gaia and speaker wobble

Speakers face a fundamental law of physics - action and reaction are equal and opposite.  When a force moves a driver forward, an equal and opposite force tries to move the enclosure backwards.  Speakers sitting loosely on carpet will wobble backwards and forwards when playing music and will sound a bit muffled or mushy.

So spikes were invented to bypass the carpet.  Isoacoustics takes this a stage further, providing vibration absorption.

The Isoacoustics GAIA is designed to provide left to right movement, but not front to back, where it would interfere with the pistonic motion of the drivers and the opposite reaction of the speaker enclosure.  That’s why the lettering should face either the front or the back, but not the sides!

Isolators like the OREA made by Isoacoustics are not directional and are intended for anything except speakers.

Hi, @hazeloop 

I watched the video.

The Isoacoustic Gaia feets are not designed for installation on soft surfaces like carpet. They should only be used on hard surfaces (wood, concrete, parquet, laminate etc. like floors) or on stands. My advice: remove the carpet from under the speakers until they reach the floor themselves to keep using Gaias, or use spikes without heels.

Teflon tape  no wobble 

@ilyavorozheykin - this is the conclusion I'm coming to. The carpet spikes that Isoacoustics sells may work for thin carpet applications, but no way for thick carpet like mine. 

The last video I posted where I moved the speaker to hardwood to test it pretty much proves this. In that video, you can see the isolator do its work as designed when the vibrations occur. In the video on carpet, the entire carpet disc moves with the speaker since the spikes can sink into the floor below the thick carpet and pad. 

I do believe the isoacoustics work, but with the right application. Conceivably, I could secure some platform (wood, granite) to the subfloor through the carpet and once I have a solid base, the gaia would work. Now, I'm down that rat hole. 

@richardbrand is right. Ideally, one's speaker cabinet will be rigidly attached to the floor so that the forward and backward motion of the woofer cones will not cause an opposite motion in the cabinet. In theory, this could "muddy" transients. Spikes simulate this sort of rigid mounting, and are especially useful with carpets (obviously, the speaker can "wobble" every which way on a carpet—which is why using the Gaia feet in conjunction with a carpet is kind of nonsensical).

However, this is not the whole story. If your floor is not itself rigid—not a concrete slab, but a suspended wood floor, for instance—then the floor itself will act as a transducer, absorbing sound from the speaker rigidly mounted to it and reverberating in an uncontrolled way. The acoustic effect of this is far worse than the minimal blurring or muddying caused by very slight reactive movements of the cabinet in response to cone movement.

Bottom line: use spikes for concrete slabs and carpets but isolation devices (Gaia, Townshend platforms, sorbothane) for suspended hardwood floors. 

I've tried Gaia and Townshend, but have settled on cheap sorbothane feet to isolate my tower speakers (Scientific Fidelity Teslas) from my hardwood floor. Soundstage and instrumental location in space are enhanced, and bass is tighter as a result. The sorbothane feet (about $50 for eight) work as well as the expensive Townshend.

By the way, Townshend has a video that shows how speakers mounted on their platforms do visibly wobble. But a seismograph mounted on top of the speaker remains flatlined even when someone is walking heavily nearby.