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