May or may not be your thing but… When we renovated the dem room in the 90s, the carpet and the floor were so mashed up from moving speakers in and out every day that had two HDF square boards made with rounded corners. We fitted female nuts directly flush into the concrete and then bolted the HDF boards directly to the floor. Then laid carpet flush around that.
Finally unscrewed the HDF and painted them in roughly the same colour as the carpet and put them back. When they got ratty again, we simply cut new HDF boards from the same template, painted them and replaced the old ones. Obviously they were large enough to accommodate a variety of speaker placements including flush against wall SBLs or well out into the room Kabers. We never used spike shoes with that. Just let the spikes sink a few mm right into the HDF. We liked it also because we could put colours tabs on it indicating placement for different speakers.
Personally, I’m not a wall to wall carpet man anymore so the above I’d never entertain. But I have to say, it worked very well.
The QX7s must bite deep into your carpet - and form a stable basis on your floor (either concrete or wooden boards?).
But logically there must be some movement of the rack(s) on the carpet (compared to if the QX7s were on the floor itself).
The question is whether or not this slight movement is audible in a particular system - which one would only know by trying the QX7s direct onto the floor.
[I have a similar issue with my SL2s which sit on thick marble slabs on top of my current thick carpet and underlay.]
hi. I got them from a local hifi dealer. Yes, mostly based on some comments - or reviews. It was some years ago, don’t really remember. My system sounds rather nice - but is it because of the spu-8? I don’t know.
What effect do you think a (larger) brass spike shoe might have on energy transfer between rack and concrete floor compared to a (smaller) steel spike shoe?
Quadraspire rack legs and feet are made of solid aluminium.
They will work I am sure. But they don’t look to have any indentation to stop easy spike slippage. I suspect a slight nock can unseat a speaker resting on those.
In my experience, the spikes don’t sink in. If the spikes are sharp what will happen is the spikes will slowly blunt or deform over a couple years depending on the weight of the load.
If you are looking to do something on the cheap, $30 on Amazon will find you any number of sets of spike shoes (with a central indent) made out of steel or brass and a pack of adhesive microphonic damping pads to stick on the floor side.
I have expensive shoes that cost several hundred $. And I have the cheap rubbish found on Amazon made in god knows where probably by some git in his garage with a lathe and scrap metal. The cheap solutions do get you 90% of the way there and I use them on everything except the big Naim system.
I’m not really sure how much good they do in that respect. I buy mine from a Japanese manufacturer. They look like 1mm thick black rubber self adhesive discs. The main point was to give the shoes a bit of grip as they slide so easily on some floors.
Don’t your Quadrasprire racks come with shoes? I have 3 of their racks and they all came with a set of shoes.
I’m surprised no one’s chipped in (no pun intended) to tell you that Naim Chips sound best (or at least have minimal adverse effect on SQ). I’m not sure about that myself, although I have used them for more than 15 years on a wooden floor. They are ridiculously expensive though.
hard to tell cause I’m too lazy to compare if sound with them is better…
