http://ethanwiner.com/speaker_isolation.htm
Very long read but basically he is saying 100% of all speaker isolation products are snake oil. He contends it's a placebo effect when we are hearing certain frequencies clearer.

Are we all hearing something that is not there?

Some Ethan Winer quotes from Youtube comment section:

Yes, the sound does change when you raise loudspeakers up on pads, but I showed with measurements that the change is due entirely to the different height. You'd get the exact same change in sound if you put the speakers on wood blocks or bricks of the same height.

I agree a 1 dB change is audible, at midrange frequencies anyway. But these devices don't do even that. Raising the speaker without isolation made more difference than any of the devices! The small changes you see are surely due to imprecise positioning. And it makes sense these gadgets do nothing because there's nothing for them to do. No competent speaker cabinet shakes and vibrates as music plays, so there's nothing to transfer. If these doohickeys actually worked, the companies that sell them would have data and proof. They do not. My article explains why people believe they hear a difference even when nothing changed other than the height.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 24, 2017

Here's the much more important question: do you hear a difference when you isolate your monitors with speaker isolation hardware? Or speaker isolation hardware versus some wooden blocks or a folded up dish towel? And is it a beneficial difference? If you don't, then speaker isolation isn't for you and you've saved a small bundle by not buying it. You should be making these decisions with your own ears and wallet, and not because some dude on the Internet went on a tirade about the speaker pad industry.

 

All I know if I take a music box out of it's box and put it on wood it sounds a lot diffrent,
and every competent speaker cabinet shakes and vibrates, it's simple newton or einstein math.
energy has to come from somewhere, if you push something forward the same energy has to go in the oposite direction

 

The title is pretty clear how I feel? The guy seems like a respected acoustic engineer. It was an interesting read.

I've been using a DIY method that I would challenge as the best price to performance ratio solution.

 

Again, you're listening to a "respected acoustic engineer" and not to what you think is the best solution, if you even require one. Respected or not, the best he can do is offer his opinion on what works or what doesn't, and any actual respected audio engineer will freely admit that what works for them may or may not work for you, or that their opinion is firmly entrenched in their own experience. I can Google any aspect of audio engineering, be it EQ, reverb, mic placement, recording levels, recording medium, whatever, and find at least five different opinions from various professionals that often contradict each other.

As a counterpoint to his argument, though, it's common practice to either decouple amps or even lay them face-up on the studio floor and mic them from above to defeat floor resonance when recording. They also put studio drum kits on risers or make sure there's mats (even iso-pad style decouplers) when recording them to get them off the floor for the same reason.

As for a DIY solution to monitor isolation, I have no doubt you probably saved yourself a a decent amount of cash and got the exact same results as a commercial solution. Most of those things seem to just be cut wedges of foam (Iso Pads), cut wedges of foam with metal plates glued to them, or aluminum and plastic bases that probably cost a dollar to make and get sold for $100+ apiece. Personally, I'm going with good ol' telescoping monitor stands -- mainly, to clear off my desktop and to get the monitors positioned at the right distance from each other (and from me). A lot of it also has to do with which monitors you use.

 

Last edited: Sep 23, 2017

12 tennis balls and two 10" x 10" billiard ball holders. I could get away with 4 per side.
I'm gonna get a few more for guitar-cab-in-closet decoupling from the floor.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 24, 2017

Sounds like an interesting idea, but how does it stay in place? Do the balls roll at all, assuming you're putting these on a desktop?

 

Ethan Winer's views are worth considering.

 

dude your missing the point, its so your desk dont vibrate homie! you can use a laundry basket or a pair of folded up towels haha! the whole point is to not have irritating vibration from the bass of the speaker carrying through the desk which is a real phenomenon.

 

LOL well there you go "Isolation" pads to improve your sound another moran.. i use pads to stop my freaking speakers Resonating the crap out of my desk and shaking my drives to bits .... its like MM said... thats how its always been .. and thats what pads were built for ...

 

Once the balls are in their slots, just like when you're transporting billiard balls it is very secure. Originally I thought about using two billiard ball holders per side to sandwich the tennis balls but once the speaker is resting directly on them it was not necessary.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 24, 2017

I totally agree with you. I made that same point as above in the Youtube comments.

This was Ethan's resposnse:
If your speakers really do shake the desk they're resting on, then your problem is the speakers, not a lack of isolation pads. Good speakers remain stable even with low frequencies at loud volumes. What brand and model speakers do you have?

Actually, measurements can tell exactly what we're hearing. They also can prove that what one thinks they hear isn't real, which happens very often. Hearing is a much more fragile sense than vision. So everybody can see the difference between HD video versus an old television set. But nobody has so far been able to reliably identify CD quality 44/16 digital audio versus high sample rates. They think they can! But when tested properly it turned out they can't. So the point is that just because you don't understand measurements, and what they show, doesn't mean they're not valid. It just means you don't understand them. That's what my article tries to explain. I'm sorry if it wasn't clear enough. But to people who do understand measurements, it proves that for all the isolators I tested, none of them changed the sound as much as simply raising the speaker 3 inches on a wood pedestal.

 

okay i got you, you are just bringing up for discussion. i feel you.

THIS is its own very important topic, i have a lot to say about it.
first what you are saying IS true, when the context is Delivery format, which is to say you have your song perfected and at very end you make it 44/16 bit wav your golden.
HOWEVER. it is absolutely false during any other stage or point in the tracking, recording, production, mixing,engineering, mastering. stages at any of those stages what your saying is absolutely false 100 percent.
so the statement itself , only has value depending on context, in one context it is true in the other it is false ( most things are context dependent)

again it is a context dependent thing we are talking about. maybe in the context you are describing iso pads have no use, but say someone has a certain monitor that rattles ( vibration from speaker cab goes to desk than plastic monitor or objects on desk) it depends on volume level, what items are on your desk and what materials they are made out of.(and of course the material being played!) reality is not as simple as you would have us believe .(i agree with everything you said though, given the specific context i just assumed you meant , your own setup and the materials its made of which monitor you have etc. all your particular variables)
blanket statements don't get us very far when talking about reality. they can hurt people just learning their craft if they take these blankets statements to heart giving misconceptions and screwing up their knowledge on the subject. anything "true" when dealing with audio is
" X statement is TRUE, in Y specific context , given Z specific variables. " however X statement is false in W specific context, given V specific variables."
the reason for this is because "reality" ( the way things actually work) is pretty complicated, even though us human beings want to convert everything into "storytelling" ( a thought construct with characters and plots and environments) our thoughts are always virtual not real.


the reason i have gone into this regarding your comment and thread, is because you can finds many books and thousands pages of info related top these topics it gets real deep.

 

Last edited: Sep 24, 2017

I have a test for you brother! just for fun create a 35 hz sine wave play it on your playback at 100 db or all the way up ( before your speakers or amp distorts make sure it perfectly clean)
WITH iso pads, and WITHOUT iso pads
that the ultimate test for your setup homes.
for myself iso pads the only way i can do that maybe your is different though

 

Remember Italic is Ethan Winer's comments.
I guess the danger in a topic with someone else's quotes is that I get credited.

I wrote Ethan, I appreciate the time it took to perform that intensive test but my one second 'hand test' placed on my desk was proof enough for me. Ever since the Tennis Ball Isolation my mixes have improved dramatically, enough to prompt my deletion of everything I uploaded to Soundcloud previous.

 

Okay, gotcha, I was thinking of those triangular pool table racks for some reason, not the holders.

 

I would love to see a Tennis Ball Isolation head-to-head with that magnet system www.dmsd.it for $620.
When I push down on a corner of the speaker, it sure looks like it's reacting similarly to that monitor in the Streaky video above.

 

Last edited by a moderator: Sep 24, 2017

can you explain this part more friend?

 

No @MMJ2017 everything in Italic like this:

italic italic italic this is italic it is a way to differentiate who ........

is not me. Sorry i wasn't clear.
Maybe I will Italicize and underline next time.

 

all I am doing is asking what is meant by this sentence "No competent speaker cabinet shakes and vibrates as music plays, so there's nothing to transfer."
I cannot understand what is meant by this,
i cannot picture any situation where the rear side of the speaker forcing the air to vibrate inside a cabinet, and yet that vibration in the lower frequencies is NOT being transferred to the cabinet .
the speaker cabinet HAS to shake and vibrate , because that is what a speaker does , and the cabinet is coupled to that speaker in order to extend the low frequencies, and the lower frequencies couple to whatever that cabinet is touching.
have you ever been to a live concert ? the low frequencies transfer all the way to your body!
that is why you feel bass through your body.
crank your music then walk in the other room with the door shut, see how the low frequencies can be heard and felt still?

i dont know shit about that fancy decoupling space age shit maybe its killer for rich people haha
I use a 50 cent peice of foam called ISO pad that came with my audiophile monitors

"dude i can feel the bass in my nut hairs so sick!"
space age decoupler opto- nut shrinker $20,000

 

Last edited: Sep 24, 2017