Mental adjustment. Here's some tech talk from designer Sven Boenicke: "In particular speakers whose feet should hold their cabinet still suffer from the effect generated by spikes. As frequencies rise, there will be inevitable resonances set up by the mass of the cabinet which reacts in invisibly small movements against the stiff springy spikes because it cannot swing freely. The energy of this restrained bouncing causes non-linear high-Q Doppler distortion mainly across the critical midrange. Our SwingBase® allows your components and speakers to move freely in the horizontal plane with as little friction as possible while offering very simple height adjustment. Ball-bearing isolators rest their spheres on a theoretically infinitely small area so either ball or bearing inevitably deform to some degree even under little weight. That compromises effectiveness when minimal horizontal friction is a must." Conflicting with deeply held notions is precisely the point of this quote. Before you shrug it off as drivel, know that none other than German speaker pope Joachim Gerhard called the SwingBase the decade's accessory. As founder of Audio Physic, Gerhardt has a sterling rep for measurement-based design work; and excellent ears. As the Wellfloat review set up, there's more to swinging freely than wearing no underwear.

Doing it the old-fashioned way so with underwear, even stacking two of these rolled-steel wedges with neoprene liners plus—not yet shown below—sand-filled piping between them and the desk wasn't 100% effective. So off the desk these DMAX SC5 speakers eventually went. Forget sundry footers of the hard, rubbery and ball-bearing kind. Been there, done that, chucked the cigar.

Here is…

… my final solution which simply bypassed the whole misery. You'll appreciate that combating structural vibrations is dear to my ears; and that especially subwoofers at 25Hz and good SPL are the worst offenders requiring the most stringent antidote we can muster.

Under my subwoofers the resident medicine is footers by Carbide Audio downstairs, by Divine Acoustics up the stairs. The former combine single-layer ball bearings with a tall captive cylinder of industrial viscoelastic. The latter exploit the points of paralleled synthetic rubies—the hardest stone after diamond—to undercut resonance transfer. Wellfloat's costly Delta Extreme parts had clearly outperformed both. One decisive side effect was reduced bass amplitude which I compensated at the subs' volume controls. Why does effective isolation reduce bass output? Because it directly countermands the generation of structure-born resonant gain whereby the entire floor mimics a piano's soundboard. Imagine decoupling piano strings from their soundboard. The instrument would sound a lot quieter and more damped. The same happens with dipole/cardioid bass. Such bass systems cancel sidewall reflections, even reduce front wall and ceiling/floor gain. They must make up for that desirable loss of time-delayed thus blurry gain with more direct-sound gain. It's why they invariably need more cone surface. Output loss versus omni bass is actual proof for how directional bass works. Likewise for floor isolation. So today's trade must be clear in your mind. You give up free but sloppy, ringy behind-the-beat structural gain so must make up for it with higher acoustic gain.

Wellfloat Delta Extreme triangle bases beneath my Dynaudio sub in lieu of bypassing my usual Divine Acoustic Kepler footers.