Firstly, sorry for my curt response…having a bad day.
My point is that any movement of the cabinet is caused by energy which is supposed to be a part of the acoustic output from the drivers. It the cabinets move, some music is lost.
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absolutely - you need to consider the speaker enclosure for most domestic sizes as the overall system, and the sound radiates in all directions becoming more directional at the higher frequencies - I forget the term used to define this transition…
Agree, that’s why cabinet vibrations should be dissipated, otherwise you’ll have vibrations back and forth from the stands/floor to the cabinets.
not necessarily - but this is why the right stands are so important for different speaker designs.
With compliance in the cabinet your can mitigate troublesome cabinet resonances and also increase sound pressures at certain frequencies causing smearing.
It is generally considered subwoofers however operate best with rigid thick-walled cabinets.
…my argument is that the cabinet should not be moving (this movement would be allowed by blu tak, rubber materials, elastic materials) and ideally not vibrating. Some vibration is, of course, inevitable, but any movement shuold be minimised, rather than facilitated by these materials.
Necessarily, unless the speaker was designed to have the cabinet vibrating in a certain way with the stands, which would be rather far-fetched since the interface to the floor is unknown to the manufacturer.
Agree as well, but there are materials capable of dissipating vibrations into heat that are virtually noncompliant.
Well I can think of one designer who does exactly that - Russell Kauffmann - ie speakers with dedicated stands and floor couplings for certain standmount speakers with cabinets with compliance at certain frequency bands. I personally think they do it very well - not perfectly - but pretty damned well.
Loudspeaker design is about managing compromises and are many different approaches and areas to focus on at the expense of others - you would be very naïve to assume there is a single wisdom…
I use the Atacama gel pads on Partington Dreadnought stands (heavy) with my Proac DB1s. I did try with Blu Tak but the sound was less open.
In view of the cost probably worth just trying yourself!
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Exactly what I found with my scm11’s
Townshend podiums and the like don’t work then?
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I was building up to asking the same question! I assume there are multiple schools of thought about all this, and hence irreconcilable discussions to keep us all busy for hours 
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Even if that’s what is specified and they sound glorious?
Isoacouatics Gaia is far from making a speaker stable. And one of the most appreciated upgrades in hifi. It’s not a straight line in finding what works best. Not many of us here understand what’s really going on me thinks 
(me included). So I bought atacama gel pads to evaluate. That’s how I normally find out.
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Me too… but they are a bugger to remove aren’t they once they are stuck on.
For me to find out 
Very interesting discussion.
Below are my Russell K Red 100 speakers which are indeed thin-walled design with no internal wadding as RK asserts that wadding can absorb a little to much high frequency information.
I can’t be sure if these stands are those specifically designed for the Russell K stand mounts but they are made from solid tubular and square cross-sectional steel, and are heavy and rigid.
You can just see that the speaker cabinets are sitting on 4 circular feet (attached to the stands) which appear to be made of hard plastic. I have ‘attached’ these feet to the cabinets by a very small piece of BluTack, to merely ‘stick’ the cabinets to the stands, rather than any kind of ‘interface’. Finally the stands are spiked to the vinyl floor covering with Naim Chips as protectors, all carefully levelled.
I got a real surprise when feeling for vibrations. The cabinets, stands and floor were all vibrating considerably, so it appears not much absorption is happening, although this is a rather subjective conclusion.
Happy to experiment but do you chaps have any ideas of what might improve things. Nothing sounds obviously out of whack, except some minor pesky resonant frequencies from my almost square room (approx 4m x 4m), which I am fairly certain are room-related.
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I would drop Russell Kauffman an email, with picture……smashing chap. Might save you a few rabbit burrows.
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The speaker stands look the same as those made by Something Solid (Deco Audio).
They used to make ‘Missing Link Feet’ as an optional extra to improve the sound. I have never heard them though.
Not sure where you got your speakers and stands but Signals used to stock Something Solid a while back.
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Some interesting discussions here, though some more about speaker design than the interface between speaker and stand or floor! Given the range of different speakers, and, though to a lesser extent, stands, the ‘right’ answer almost certain to vary between designs - and if in doubt one could refer to the manufacturer. Of course, individual people’s preference for sound character, compounded by individual room effects, suggests that to confirm personal suitability it is really a matter of picking a few options and trying…
Some of the comments on here are rather curious: in the vast majority of box speakers the tweeter has a closed back, so there is effectively no HF within the cabinet, and hence the only HF radiation from the cabinet walls results from lower frequency vibrations exciting cabinet components, causing spurious higher frequency sound that is entirely foreign to the music, and so, at least to my mind, best prevented or suppressed as far as possible. Some midrange drivers are similarly closed back - ATC’s stunning dome midrange unit is one- or is often enclosed within its own box isolated from the external speaker cabinet except at the mounting, again effectively preventing any or at least keeping to a very low level - in such designs any radiation from the cabinet walls would be just as spurious and foreign to the music as described above for HF.
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