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Feet (not Spikes) for Speaker Stands

Sure, the Earth’s gravity tends to dictate that speakers and their stands end up on the floor, but we should not necessarily view that as an ideal, especially when it comes to physically coupling them and transmitting energy and vibration.

Since putting a pair of Kytes on a brick wall in my kitchen with Rega's OEM "bit o' angle iron and a few screws" I've come to a similar conclusion. Mounting speakers (or turntable shelves) to timber framed walls on the other hand has never produced good results for me.
 
I’m not convinced. In the UK at least most floors are wooden boards over joists, I’m not sure of the exact measurements, but from memory about 7” x 1/2” x pretty long. A floor is conceptually not hugely different from a giant guitar soundboard.

One of the reasons I’m a big fan of a good carpet plus underlay plus rug situation is to apply as much damping to the floor as is possible, as in most cases it is an obvious resonator (the other reason being I also view it as the ‘dead end’ vs. the ceiling acoustically).

Anyone who has ever owned a suspended turntable with a high centre of gravity (Linn, TD-160 etc) will know this only too well as in most UK rooms you have to tiptoe around like a cat burglar in a sleeping household or the turntable will jump. The floor is often not a stable or stationary structure. It has a bounce, one or more resonant frequencies or points of movement.

Sure, the Earth’s gravity tends to dictate that speakers and their stands end up on the floor, but we should not necessarily view that as an ideal, especially when it comes to physically coupling them and transmitting energy and vibration.
You can't damp the floor with a carpet, the carpet is too lite for that. It will absorb high frequency and some midrange - acoustic energy, not mechanical vibration.. I think most residential flooring has a similar construction as governed by the IBC - International Building Code. Maybe older British construction is bouncier.

Substantial damping (approaching critical at 50%) of the low frequency motion of a heavy speaker is very hard. You will need large and ugly isolators working against very solid ground - both top and bottom.

Elastic pucks under speakers offer just a few percent damping ratio - say 10. This makes them ineffective in damping the overall movements of the cabinet. They won't damp cabinet resonances at all.

Simple analysis that I did shows that a spiked speaker on a stand moves half as much as pucked one under woofer forces - provided your floor isn't trampoline-like.
 
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