Hi all
I am interested regarding decoupling and what we trying to decouple from.
Is decoupling not wasted when speakers are generating sound wave vibrations within the room, directly at equipment and not necessarily from the ground up?
I used townshend stella stands to decouple my summit x . Made a massive improvement in bass response and control . also used sonority design stands under 804s with similar improvements .
If you have a speaker that’s rigidly spiked, the vibrations generated could result in noticeable box colourations being heard.
Box colouration as such is the noise the cabinet makes as well as that from the drivers. This can lead to the perception when listening that the music is more or less inhabiting the area of the speakers rather than having a free flowing soundstage.
This will depend on the speaker itself. It’s construction and other design that the maker has brought in regarding this.
Some that have gone that extra effort in minimising box colourations using heavy thick multi constrained materials could gain a little bit more freedom by decoupling.
Certainly any relatively budget speaker that’s just a large box will work better.
Some speakers though have a thin wall lossy approach and try to tune colourations to the benefit of its design, which might prefer a light rigid spiked coupling instead.
Your Totems have decoupling fittings on them though, as part of the design. It minimises sound waves reverberating back through the system.
My take on decoupling is that it tries to minimise energy from transferring from one device, or part of a device, in to another.
Naim use decoupling extensively in order to try to minimise microphonic effects, whether it be by decoupling mounts for PCB boards (taken to the extreme of mass loaded fully suspended boards in the top end kit), or the rather ingenious decoupling used in Powerlines, Hi-lines, and SL connectors. It’s one reason why Naim put as much attention into the mechanical design of their kit as they do the electronic side - the mechanical engineering provides the best foundation for the electronics to work at their optimum level.
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It’s not wasted but you’re not wrong either.
Most comes through the solid fixtures but airborne vibrations do colour things. There are plenty of systems where the electronics are in in one room and speakers in another for just this reason.
Hifi isn’t about absolutes. It’s about finding the best set of solutions with the least compromise. And all solutions to all problems have some.
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More referring to airborne sound wave vibrations Mike.
I always thought that speakers should be rigidly coupled to the floor, either directly through their own spikes or a rigid stand with spikes etc.
Then I was confronted by a new floor that was determined to play along with the Fact12s. Then Sonority Design stepped in with (to me) unintuitive wobbly stands, that worked wonders - the speakers still interact with the room, but no longer directly with the floor. Magic!
Music: Lux Aeterna by Terje Rypdal
Interesting, are they off putting to look at long term wobbling back and forth?
Wobbling was courtesy of me holding the iPad and giving them a shove. 
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Aagh…understand
Don’t the IsoAcoustic Gaias work on the same principle ? I have a feeling that the Sonority platforms are a bit more difficult to set up.
If you doubt the benefit, try it with a turntable on a wooden floor above a crawl space, as we have. With the relatively inexpensive Herbie’s Fat Glider under the ProAcs, and the stylus on an LP on the Fraim, with the turntable turned off, turn up the volume to 10, 11 and 12 o’clock, then past 12 as far as you dare. Tap the platter and listen for feedback with Herbie’s and then go back to your spikes. The Herbie’s made a believer out of me, and they now allow us to play vinyl at unreal volumes with no feedback. There are upgrades available, and we too have upgraded, but Herbie’s prove the point.
In many ways that’s like my SL2s, which sit on leaf springs and can oscillate back and forth, rather than side to side.
I believe they are - Mr. Stephen Hitch (from Sonority) and a small bevy of spirit levels did it for me and transformed the sound.
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