Practical limits. Now I was at the limits of my hearing abilities. I couldn't tell whether six Wellfloat beneath the very heavy Artesanía rack against the usual Spanish floor interfaces made any appreciable difference. My personal takeaway from this versus the prior experiments was a clear-cut order of importance. Subwoofer first, speakers second, rack last. Obviously I'm talking performance-engineered racks with built-in multi-stage resonance attenuation. I very much expect generic wood furniture appropriated as hifi support to benefit from proper floor isolation. In fact a point could be made that going for a cost-effective bamboo rack fitted with separate floor isolators could perform on par with costly audiophile racks. Sub/speaker-generated vibrations tend to far exceed what electronics generate themselves. That makes floor isolation primary. Whether engineered racks like Artesanía's and Hifistay's as my resident choices can still benefit from extreme floor isolators beyond what they provide already I'm less certain of. Also, the sheer mass of the Artesanía made playing footsies hard work indeed.
Hearing limits intruded likewise in…
…a Hifistay/Wellfloat battle beneath Qualio's IQ speakers. Unlike upstairs where basic rubber-sleeved spikes were clearly if surprisingly upstaged, downstairs my Korean roller-ball footers performed on par with bigger costlier Wellfloat. The upstairs showing simply reiterated why I don't want my speakers coupled to the floor. I now see that I must include even the smaller system where low mass and absentee bass from petite monitors suggested that for them extra isolators would make no difference. It was far smaller than under my subs of course but in a do-all-you-can context, still worthy of my attention.
Carbide Audio's footers beneath the sub are taller than the Wellfloat so visually more intrusive.
Well floated? Absolutely. Today's upshot is clear. Disrupting mechanical vibration traffic between transducers and floor is critical. Subwoofers then speakers are our primary targets. While suspended upstairs flooring suffers worse to maximize such isolation gains, ground-floor support is far from immune. In my experience thus far, Wellfloat's undeniably costly Delta Extreme showed itself to be the most effective disruptor of my acquaintance. Without half-priced Standard Delta for contrast, I can't say how close they might come. I do know that were I as well stocked on hifi improvement cashish as the Wellfloat are clearly effective, two Delta Extreme for my Dynaudio 18S sub and three underneath the sound|kaos D15 would happily smoke it. So pass around the insight that isolated from the floor not coupled to it is the superior way to hear our hifi; particularly with the kit which finally transforms electrical signal into physical motion – our transducers. I find it 'super' necessary; certainly more so than most AC filtering, all digital filter options, cable lifts, PCM/DSD conversions, cable conniptions beyond solid basics, Audirvana/PureMusic offsets and such. All those have their place but to me come much farther down the line. First things first, second things second etc. It's a rather endless litany one might want to opt out of sooner than later. I just don't think you'd want to before having sorted your floor interfaces especially if you're anywhere upstairs; or run subwoofers.
From me then an obituary: Dear old spike, rest in peace.
PS: Wellfloat make a variety of so-called boards with load ratings from 17kg to 300kg in all manner of different sizes. Those embed the same tech in a single ABS, MDF or MDF+steel assembly for when three or four individual Delta pieces are overkill.
US importer's reply: Reading your Wellfloat review in more detail now, I totally agree. When you remove the floor resonance which becomes its own off-the-beat transducer, there's a perception of less bass. You compensated with subwoofer controls, I did by rerunning my DSP processing with room EQ wizard to create a new convolution filter for Roon. The audible difference was enough to make me feel like I needed to redo the DSP. It's funny how many audiophiles will spend countless dollars on speaker cables which are not nearly as much of a gross distorter.
