[Atlplasma]

I'm considering buying 8 of these for my speakers but am wondering which version is the best value. How does brass, stainless, or titanium affect sound quality. It seems that deciding between brass and stainless might be more a matter of aesthetics, but the description suggests that titanium improves the audio. Just curious and wanting further explanation.

[jdoris]

I use the brass ones under some heavy (135 lbs each) speakers, and a heavy butcher block rack, on a hardwood floor.  They are splendid in this role: the teflon makes tweaking placement easy, and the deep cup means the spikes don't slip out and maim the floor, even on my very uneven floor.   If you're on wood, make sure the floor and sliders are very clean: the teflon is soft, and can pick up grit that *will* scratch your floor.

Personally, I'd be surprised if there were readily detectable sonic differences among the metals, but the cost difference is not great. 

Steve is super to deal with, as you probably know.

J

[Herbie]

Hard, rigid materials all have a unique sonic vibrational character that affect the musical palette. Titanium is generally amongst the most audio-friendly, sonically neutral of rigid materials.

All three versions of Cone/Spike Decoupling Gliders improve a system's audio because of the decoupling and isolation function that they provide. Sonic differences between brass, stainless, and titanium Gliders will be quite subtle, but noticeable in a highly resolving system, with titanium giving a bit more of a pure result.

If budget considerations are most important, brass would be the best value (or stainless if it's a better aesthetic match). If sonic results are most important, titanium is the best value.

Steve
Herbie's Audio Lab
 

[Atlplasma]

Thanks jdoris and Steve for the helpful feedback. I'll give it a try and see (hear) what happens.

Steve

[Tone Depth]

Do spikes/cones function to couple a speaker to the floor?  If so, why not just remove the spikes/cones rather than adding decoupling gliders? 

[Herbie]

Hi, Tone Depth. Placing speaker cabinets directly on a bare or carpeted floor wouldn’t do any good. Speakers generate a lot of acoustical mechanical energy and vibration, which vibrate the cabinet that holds the speaker drivers in place. Vibrating drivers produce untrue and distorted music.

The whole idea behind getting the best potential out of loudspeakers is to keep the baffles where the speaker drivers are mounted as vibration-free as possible. With a speaker cabinet placed on a bare floor, the cabinet is basically unconstrained from vibrating freely, even less so on a carpeted floor.

A speaker cabinet weighing fifty pounds, with a “footprint’ of 12 inches by 12 inches, has a mass/load at the speaker/floor interface of about 1/3 of a pound per square inch. That’s not much pressure to keep the cabinet from vibrating. If you add 20,000-pounds of mass to the speaker, you’d then have about 142 pounds per square inch of pressure at the cabinet/floor interface, and that would certainly help to subdue much of the cabinet vibration. Of course, that’s not practical.

By using cones, the cabinet’s fifty pounds is concentrated on just a few minuscule points. If the total area of the points’ contact is 1/16", you’ll have 800 pounds per square inch of pressure, which will resist a lot of vibration (but not all). Cones use geometry also do “drain” vibrations away.

Draining vibrations with cones or spikes is not perfect as a whole solution, however. Some cabinet vibrations will drain into the floor and become floor-borne vibrations that can affect other electronics. Some of these vibrations will also reverberate right back up the way they came. The floor itself will resonate some vibrations back up the spike which will introduce some vibrational “character” depending on the material of which it is made.

By adding Cone/Spike Decoupling Gliders, cone or spike vibrations are efficiently absorbed by the Gliders’ dBNeutralizer material. Speaker and floor are decoupled and isolated from one another providing additional sonic benefit. And, Gliders allow for easy mobility of the speakers.

Steve
Herbie’s Audio Lab