Hi Srajan, I was about to wish you well then realized that I don't need to, you're one of the lucky few who haven't had the C-virus as yet. Have you ever had a listening room with suspended wooden floors? Did you need to do anything to damp the floor of sympathetic resonances ? I feel I'm losing bass because of a suspended wooden floor. Cheers, David Masilamoni
Indeed, no C19 yet and that without any vaccinations. As to your question, yes but not exactly how you may think. It's not that I damp the floor. I simply prevent the gear, speakers and sub from sinking energies into it. That relies on decouplers so the opposite of spikes. We want to disrupt the transmission of mechanical resonances into the floor where they amplify and propagate. Coupling a subwoofer to a floor is no different than coupling a subwoofer to the chassis of a boom truck. The boom-truck owner is looking to maximize bass output so he uses his car like a giant resonator. A piano does the same with its soundboard. Guitars and violins do by coupling their strings to resonant tone wood. Replace a piano soundboard with concrete and watch the sound die. If we take away the floor as a structural resonator (and suspended upstairs wood floors are excellent resonators), we will delete its contribution to SPL. That's like room gain. Each reflective surface adds output to the signal. Isolators or bass traps reduce SPL/output/power but increase clarity. Like reflections, resonances are always late. They happen after the original/direct event. Late means delayed. If direct signal is followed by delayed signal, the result is a blur in time. The sharp thin line drawn by a hard tip becomes a smudged thick line with ambiguous edges.
Isolating speakers and subwoofers from the floor so they can't talk to it and it doesn't talk back (always late) improves time-domain behavior. That improves clarity, definition and intelligibility. But it also removes some structural gain. If you've looked at anechoic speaker measurements, you'll see that invariably, the response drops like a rock below 100Hz. That's because all speaker designers count on room gain to add itself to their response. If that were flat in an anechoic chamber, it'd get bass heavy like hell in actual rooms. The same applies to isolation. You gain speed, precision and transparency but you'll give up some output. With an active bass system, that's easily compensated. With passive bass, it's not unless you do it with software EQ in the digital source. So if you say that you're losing bass because of a suspended wooden floor… yes and no. You're losing timing precision and pitch definition because the floor gets involved and talks back; but you're gaining some free output for the very same reason. Makes sense? Srajan
