De-couple speakers from desk?

I was at Guitar Center the other day and a guy was trying to sell me a piece of foam for $44 to set the speaker on in order to “de-couple” it from the desk. My monitors already have the foam ring around the cone. I thought the purpose of that was to allow the speaker to move freely. Is this just a garbage sales pitch? If it really does improve the sound, do I really need a $44 piece of foam or will most any foam do?
BTW, I am happy with the sound already, we just ended up on the subject somehow…
Sincerely,
J.L.

I got similar pieces from thomann.de which are €14,- Whether they have much effect from the decoupling I don’t know, but I do know that my sound has improved because the angled design of the foam allows me to direct the speakers to my listening position better. I doubt the €44 ones do much else than that, but what do I know :slight_smile:

The idea is to decouple the vibrating speaker box from the table and kill the vibrations from transfer from the box into the table at the resonance frequencies. Not only does the speaker enclosure have resonance frequencies but your table, your screen, your coffee cup etc leading to comb filtering effects. To get the speakers away from the table altogether I built two speaker stands and put one foam pad under each monitor from some packaging material ($0) and it seems to work? This also let me move the monitors away from the walls and corners to avoid exaggerating the low end. Very nice even sound for the price me thinks … How much the foam attributes to that I dunno but I don’t intend to change haha!

So I did like Steve sort of. I can’t imagine that store bought “professional” foam pads are THAT much better than something softbutfirm from somewhere. The real difference ought to be more between NO foam pads vesus pro/no name pads if you ask me. But ask the monitors if they feel any difference :mrgreen:

$44? Come on! Do what Steve did and use some spare semi-soft material and build your own. I’m using pieces of 2" thick honeycomb cardboard sheet (press machine paper roll transport packaging material).

That is what I said to the salesman! I was fairly certain the foam was overpriced. I was just wondering if there is much benefit at all. Looks like there can be some benefit. I was thinking about a piece of that black foam that is used to insulate water pipes. It is fairly soft but somewhat dense. “Memory” foam would probably do also. Anyway, thanks for the replies!
J.L.

De-coupling material is not a one size fits all thing.

The old Blu-Tac works well and also secures the speakers in place.

I have two concrete pavers, 22cm x 22cm x 4cm (heavy), plus some 2cm thick foam pads under each of my two Mackies on the desk top, that seems to work well.

Mauri.

I build two monitor stands from PVC pipes with a 6" diameter, filled with sand. They do their job very well. :slight_smile:

Ok… after much searching and head scratching I found these > Silver Wire with cotton isolation - Woodlenses

“balanced sound on precious wood” !!!

“allows for very low friction, low noise interface points, which is sonically crucial.
By decoupling horizontally and providing a “excellent sounding” vertical interface medium” :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

A bargain at a mere £219 a set :astonished:

As a bonus, here’s another “interesting” thing!

http://www.dhtrob.com/projecten/elna1_en.shtml

Whoaa! Have to get a set of those … after getting gold-plated network cables for my backup NAS disk server. (You know, the standard network cable is unable to preserve the fidelity of my audio files.)

Oh! That’s what they mean when they talk about re-capping :smiley:

:astonished:

So … what exactly is the difference if you measure a standard cap with this “improved” snake oiled cap?
Have they just invented Deaf Faith? :laughing:

I suppose ideally you would have no matter touching the speakers at all. You’d need a magnetic field to float the speaker in, but that would probably affect your speaker’s sound and might cause problems especially at low frequencies at high volume, as they might throw your speaker out of the magnetic field :smiley:

Also you’d probably still get some coupling through the magnetic field and probably cost more than the “rare wood” blobs.

I’ve just been redoing the acoustics in my studio and had some long slivers of high density rock wool cut from the side of the slabs, they seem to work really well for plonking your speakers on.

Old School required hanging speakers from chains which works very well as each link de-couples. :nerd:

I use Auralex speaker pad which have an angle adjusting feature and work well. :smiley:

Indeed. That’s why I would recommend using 20t (for mid-size nearfields, heavier for bigger speakers, lighter for smaller ones) concrete blocks with anti-gravitation generators.

Oh! I have perfect angle adjustment devices: old C-casettes between monitors and de-coupling pads. Angle can be adjusted by how far under the speaker you push the casettes.

:astonished:

I’d luuve to see a YouTube clip from the lab where somebody is actually trying this stuff out. :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

NOOO! You’re ruining the market! That is just WRONG! :imp:

:mrgreen:

http://www.aml.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/research/hang_maglev/hang_maglev_e.html