Stillpoints or Audio Points, has anyone compared

Tvad, not sure what speakers you have and how much they weigh.

My speakers weigh 110 lbs. apiece with most of the weight concentrated on the front. The drivers and especially the 50 lb. ribbon right on the front make them extremely front loaded. I simply placed the Vibrapods accordingly based on the proportional weight of my speakers.

The grout line in the middle is not a concern of mine since 3/4 of the weight is centered right in the front of my speakers and consequently away from the center of the tiles.

I think you would be in great shape to simply distribute the appropriate rated Vibrapods according to the weight distribution of your speakers. I doubt your speakers will be as heavily weighted toward the front as mine so placing a couple of Vibrapods under the seam would probably work beautifully.

One suggestion. For stability purposes, I would use more Vibrapods than less. For instance: on a one hundred pound speaker you could use four #5 pods distributed accordingly or ten #3 pods. The ten pods would support the equivalent weight of the four pods, but the weight would be distributed more evenly.

BTW, the floor sliders are 3/16 of an inch, the pods are 9/16 of an inch and the Travertine is 1/2 thick. Total for the sandwich, 1 3/4 inches. Not really that much.

Aloha,

Warren

Fiddler thanks for the nice try the open mind! There may be again, a second round. In the mean time listen and enjoy..Tom

Jayboard the whole approach is to not impede the flow but to allow the flow to happen more easily. If you add a point or mass to the top of a component you will disrupt the speed and have multiple points of exit..none being more coherent or efficient than the ones down below as when coupling with Audiopoints or Sistrum ..Tom

Jayboard, I don't mean any offense but I disagree with just about everything you've said above. Perhaps you've already indicated this in your post above, but upon a careful read of that post, you seem to indicate that you have experimented with and know perhaps as much about vibration control as some to many of the rest of us in this thread. Maybe less.

Nevertheless, you espouse your position with such eloquence and sense of authority, I wish I had your writing skills.

-IMO

Stehno, I'm sure I'm in the vast middle ground in terms of experience fooling around with different vibration control techniques. I don't claim special authority on this topic. If my post came off that way, it's only because I want to be specific enough about my point of view so that people who want to argue it can be specific, too. That gets the discussion a little farther along, I think.

I am suspicious of pure doctrines in hifi, especially those that take the form of "this approach is the best for every situation." Things usually are way more complicated than that. That's why I try to critique "isolation v. coupling" as a useful dichotomy. I prefer to take a systems approach in looking at what we're doing when we try to control vibration.

My main beef (at least if you ask me today) is the implied assertion by the Pure Coupling camp that mechanical energy behaves the same way as electrical energy, that earth is always at zero potential with respect to vibration of objects upon the earth, so coupling to it is naturally the best solution for vibration control. This sounds nice, but is there any basis for this assertion? (Whether coupling to earth is practically achievable, given wood floors, etc., is a whole 'nother question.)

This is a little off track, but I somewhat misquoted Starsound's Robert in my post, and I'd like to correct that. He said "The Sistrum Platform...vibrates continuously and simultaneously...The Sistrum Platform is also the noisiest platform in the world...Our noisy 'rattle triangle' vibrates creating a multitude of frequencies...well above as well as well below that of our human hearing." How is this draining vibrations to earth?

Thanks for your comments -- absolutely no offense taken.