Confused by details?

The devil lives in the details, cleanliness is next to God. Confused yet? Then riddle me this: what's different about the upper and lower speaker installs? Before this gets all Sphynxian, let me do the honours. In the office setup, the Virtual Hifi Vibron isolation footers sat between Viper monitor and its stand's top plate. In the upstairs system, they instead sat between the stand's plinth and floor. And now we're right back at God and the devil, cleanliness and details. If we use stands, it's easy to grip their uprights whilst music plays to feel whether any mechanical vibrations have their metal tubing vibrate. The high-mass religion calls that a bad thing as though we could actually hear it like a subliminal bell. Not. Still, their followers want sand-filled or solid tubing which, like a rail-road track, becomes an ideal two-directional vibration transmitter. It can actually reflect resonances back whence they came: into our loudspeakers. In the lower photo, the 3D-printed footers proved such effective vibration disruptors that hand on heart and stand, I felt no vibrations in my hollow thin-walled stand tube at all whilst music played quite loudly. Isolationists will applaud. Job done. But is it?

In the upper photo, the very same isolators moved to the floor to hard-couple the speakers to the stands' top plate. The same hand-on-tube test now showed clear ringing. Very obviously, now vibrations generated by the compound surface of an 11½" woofer inside a small 7-litre cab escaped. Get-outa-jail-free tickets. At least some energies generated by trapped rear waves dissipated in the 'live' stands to make the cabs quieter whilst the isolators prevented any spill into the floor. By sweating this devilish detail, the god of cleanliness bestowed his blessing powers on a more lucid, airy and feathery upper midrange and treble. My takeaway? If you have the chance, experiment. You could just upend a pervasive masculine belief in high-mass stands to prefer a deliberately lively far lighter hence cheaper stand type. That should simply isolate from the floor but not the speaker atop it to act as music-activated vibrational dissipator. It's a perfectly free experiment to conduct. We simply swap isolator locations. That's all I've got for today. Let me quickly get back to feeling smart whilst I still do. It never lasts long…