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isoacoustics isolators

JTC said:
I really don't think the sound was at all 'bloated' or distorted before. It sounds much the same, it's just that the levels are a touch lower. It's odd, but I will need to acclimatise.
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JTC, there should definitely be a change to the bass as well, in terms of tunefulness, sort of "cleaning up", from my limited experience. I would go back to what another fishie here said which is suggest that you do a fresh set-up for positioning, then add the gaia's back in. You should get a mountain of improvement on the whole.

My gut tells me that order of operations would be;

1. positioning, bungs inserted, crossover set to flat.
2. Add back in gaias
3. play with crossover
4. play with bungs

but that's just on instinct.
 
Good idea, but bungs will alter the bass output, so positioning needs to be adjusted again without bungs.

the bungs are there if you can’t actually position in the correct place and they become too boomy.. if your in a position to position them far enough away from the rear and side walls to get the bass in the right place from the listening position then you can bin the bung.
 
It’s early but I just removed the bungs without moving the speakers and it’s sounding lovely (albeit at low volumes so far)...

Further update: I don't want to jinx it but I think the speakers seem fine where they are - no obvious peaks or nulls, nice tight and solid bass, all sounding balanced and correct. I think I slightly messed up the toe-in when putting the speakers+Gaias onto the spiked discs - but only slightly. Seems that I reduced the toe-in a bit so need to rotate the RHS speaker by a tiny bit, see if I can improve the imaging further, but it's sounding great as it is.... bit tight clearance for the door to its right hand side though, it clears with less than 10mm to spare, might move it a tad further, maybe to get 15mm clearance. Don't need much :)
 
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On the back of my recent adoption of IsoAcoustics Gaias and Oreas, I decided to just finish the job off properly and have ordered 8 IsoPuck Mini feet to put under CDT, DAC and Mjolnir. Should have them later in the week.

That will leave me just to source a pair of tunable tubed bass traps and - maybe, just maybe - a new RCM later in the year. And I’m done
 
As an experiment that you can do for free, set up your hifi at a reasonable listening level, go upstairs and measure how loud it is. If you have gear for this, great. If not, you will have to hope that you can trust your ears. Then go back downstairs and put the speakers on pillows, towels, folded duvet, whatever, and listen again, upstairs. Don't worry too much about what it sounds like downstairs. You will, if you check, notice that with your speakers on duvets do not allow any sound to be transmitted to the floor. My money says that upstairs the noise level will be the same, give or take. This will prove how effective floor isolation would be. Again, my money says "not very".

Try this and report back. If you can't fix your problem by putting your speakers on duvets, towels, a mattress, whatever, then hundreds or even thousands of pounds on IsoDogsBollocks Acoustics Isolators will not be any better. Evne if your lightened bank account might tell you that it does.
 
I don't get where that last post comes from, but I couldn't give a **** how much noise is transmitted upstairs with or without isolators. That's not the point. They're there because they improve the sound, and I'm going to go on the line and say that the difference with my speakers with and without is bigger than the difference in sound I'd get between a £100 and a £2k DAC (say) or any cable change. Pretty big and easy to hear the difference - there's no 'is there or isn't there a difference' question about it.
 
stevec67 said:
As an experiment that you can do for free, set up your hifi at a reasonable listening level, go upstairs and measure how loud it is. If you have gear for this, great. If not, you will have to hope that you can trust your ears. Then go back downstairs and put the speakers on pillows, towels, folded duvet, whatever, and listen again, upstairs. Don't worry too much about what it sounds like downstairs. You will, if you check, notice that with your speakers on duvets do not allow any sound to be transmitted to the floor. My money says that upstairs the noise level will be the same, give or take. This will prove how effective floor isolation would be. Again, my money says "not very".

Try this and report back. If you can't fix your problem by putting your speakers on duvets, towels, a mattress, whatever, then hundreds or even thousands of pounds on IsoDogsBollocks Acoustics Isolators will not be any better. Evne if your lightened bank account might tell you that it does.
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Surely for that test to have any validity you would first need to compare the energy absorbing characteristics of duvets and an iso dogs doo dah? Just assuming that a duvet and iso acoustics device have the same energy absorbing characteristics would invalidate the experiment unless, by some extraordinary coincidence, they were the same!
 
JTC said:
I don't get where that last post comes from, but I couldn't give a **** how much noise is transmitted upstairs with or without isolators. That's not the point. They're there because they improve the sound, and I'm going to go on the line and say that the difference with my speakers with and without is bigger than the difference in sound I'd get between a £100 and a £2k DAC (say) or any cable change. Pretty big and easy to hear the difference - there's no 'is there or isn't there a difference' question about it.
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Thanks for your assessment, although you may have inadvertently given ammunition to those who like to decree and pronounce without listening, in that many of them have decided that there is no difference between £100 and £2k DAC let alone cables. In any case given the range of speakers and rooms in which these devices will be used, measurements can only go so far and it is very valuable to have a good range of user experience. Anecdotal that may be, but that doesn’t negate its value.
 
camverton said:
Surely for that test to have any validity you would first need to compare the energy absorbing characteristics of duvets and an iso dogs doo dah? Just assuming that a duvet and iso acoustics device have the same energy absorbing characteristics would invalidate the experiment unless, by some extraordinary coincidence, they were the same!
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No. The point is that a folded duvet blocks solid to solid physical transmission of sound waves through solid media. This you can prove, and you know that it does. Go one further if you wish, suspend the speaker from a string. Then you know, absolutely definitively, that there is no solid-solid transmission. What I am aiming to prove, and can prove by this experiment, is that the problem is not transmission to the floor, then the walls, then the ceiling, but airborne sound. However good your device is under your speakers it can't be better than fresh air. A folded duvet approximates to fresh air. A bike inner tube even closer still. But this is nitpicking. The OP's problem is airborne sound, and this experiment proves it (or not). No device under your speakers, however expensive, will do anything at all for airborne sound energy, and this is your problem here. If I'm wrong, and a duvet or anything else under the speakers changes the amount of noise heard upstairs, then by all means start playing tunes with isolating devices. But I'll bet a pound to a pinch that it won't.
 
I have experimented with inner tubes. It was a while ago, but I recall that under my speakers there was an improvement in bass but I detected a slight “smearing” in the higher frequencies. It would have been interesting to try Townshend but at the price I wasn’t tempted to experiment. Under my subwoofer I detected a slight improvement in definition of bass. Measuring with REW at the listening position there was a reduction in distortion when using the inner tube. Not sure how valid that is though, but as it sounded better I left it in place until buying speakers that don’t require a sub.
 
It's all about the interface. Unless you can completely 100% suspend/isolate/float/levitate the speakers so that there is no physical connection whatsoever between the speakers and the room - floor, walls or ceiling - then the interface will always play a part.
 
My feeling about isolation and mounting the speaker is that it part of the issue is interchange between speaker and floor, and part to do with how the speaker is held in place, fixed, damped, underdamped, or overdamped. In other words, the mounting of the loudspeaker has in some ways more to do with the bracing or resonance control in the box, than it does have to do with the floor being sprung or solid, etc. Now I could be wrong, or very, very wrong, but I don't give much more than a rat's petootie about it, because I know that the ISOacoustics products make loudspeakers--most of them--sound way, way better.
 
Keith, noticed you didn't respond to my earlier query? Have you tried a set on your floorstanding Hedd's? I trust your ears....don't you??

Also:

 
I got the mini pucks to use under my Tannoy Autograph minis. i do sense an improvement in sound, though they seem more wobbly on the stand and at greater risk of being bumped off.
 
Naim/Focal were doing a similar experiment at the London Indulgences show 2-3 years ago (maybe longer) using the Gaia feet under Focal floorstanders.

With similar results.
 
Rug Doc said:
Good idea, but bungs will alter the bass output, so positioning needs to be adjusted again without bungs.

the bungs are there if you can’t actually position in the correct place and they become too boomy.. if your in a position to position them far enough away from the rear and side walls to get the bass in the right place from the listening position then you can bin the bung.
Click to expand...

That's what I got to. I have followed parts of this thread but went for a different solution. Wooden breadboard with castors and a granite slab from Tesco! with the speakers sitting on top. I then added more lovely Tesco granite slabs to the speaker tops and added a breadboard. Ignoring the products in my case getting the speakers out into the room and toed-in correctly and adding weight to the top and raising them off the floor is perfect for me. No measurements though but I do accept what Keith says about measuring the room and how the room itself will have a big impact. I think most people posting accept that.
 
yuckyamson said:
Keith, noticed you didn't respond to my earlier query? Have you tried a set on your floorstanding Hedd's? I trust your ears....don't you??

Also:

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Not really, I prefer measurements, you realise that increasing the distance from the floor ( tabletop in this case) changes the FR?
A valid comparison would be to place the other pair on a directly coupled stand the same height as the isoacoustics stand.
If anyone has a before and after REW plot of any loudspeaker isolation device I would be interested to see it.
Keith
 
JTC said:
I don't get where that last post comes from, but I couldn't give a **** how much noise is transmitted upstairs with or without isolators. That's not the point. They're there because they improve the sound, and I'm going to go on the line and say that the difference with my speakers with and without is bigger than the difference in sound I'd get between a £100 and a £2k DAC (say) or any cable change. Pretty big and easy to hear the difference - there's no 'is there or isn't there a difference' question about it.
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Read post no 1. What you want is up to you, it's not what the OP asks.
 
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