hardwood floors, area rugs, and spiked feet


We're putting in solid oak hardwood floors and have purchased decent quality oriental area rugs, one of which is going into my listening space to cover the flooring between the listening location and the speakers. The rug will extend under the speakers. So the question is, what to do to stabilize the speakers on top of the rug without the spikes damaging the flooring underneath. The carpet is pretty thick and dense; it won't do just to remove the spikes and depend on the speaker feet.

I need a method to somewhat blunt the spikes but still enable them to get down into the backing of the rug. It won't do to just round over the spikes; the weight of the speakers will still damage the flooring. I'm thinking there's got to be some sort of a combination of a disc and shallow spike setup. I looked in several catalogs but came up empty.

Surely one of you folks has run into this problem in the past?
fripp1
How 'bout a piece of sheet metal lined with cork? Wont make your rug look funny.
If your situation changes so that the speakers will not be on the rug, try spikes or cones (e.g., Audiopoint, Mapleshade, etc.) with coupling disks by Audiopoint (or similar) sitting on Herbies Big Fat Dots between the disks and your hardwood floor. Protects the floor, decouples the speaker and sounded better than spikes in my former set-up over an oak hardwood supported floor.
Don't use spikes, use a decoupling type device like the Aurios. It's been my experience that unless you move your speakers around alot, spikes don't noticeably damage hardwood floors. The marks they leave are quite small.
If the rugs are wool watch out for static electricity, I damaged some componets that way even though they were grounded.
Herbies Audio Labs' cone/spike decoupling gliders are designed specifically for this application. I used them on my carpet and will as well on my own recently installed hardwood floors' once the poly finish cures in a few days.
In addition to protecting your floors they also reduce floor-bourne vibrations and bring improved clarity to your speakers. They come with a 90-day money back guarantee so it's a no-brainer.