BillFitzmaurice.info

What is the theory behind things like speaker spikes and the auralux sub dude?

Any merit to the ideas?

subharmonic wrote: Any merit to the ideas?

No. The theory is to stop the cab walls from vibrating against the floor. If the cab vibrates that badly it's defective.

subharmonic wrote:What is the theory behind things like speaker spikes and the auralux sub dude?

Any merit to the ideas?

My understanding is decoupling the two to help eliminate ringing at natural frequencies or rattling of nearby objects like a table, desk or floor its placed on. I have a JBL LSR 4312 subwoofer that I've used for my recording rig. When it was all upstairs in a wood frame house the response did seem smoother to my ears...maybe it was placebo effect. I got generally the same result without the SubDude when I moved the sub to a concrete slab foundation. I guess the floor upstairs may have resonated some way at various frequencies and the Subdude did help decouple some. That was my experience.

For recording at least, I'm just about ready to stop using the sub and check my bass mix on headphones to get the room out of the "picture". If they're not placed right I think they cause more problems than they fix for mixing. Now I doubt I'll actually get rid of it, but use it for occasional checks and when I'm just in the mood to hear "thump". Right now it's in a foundation level room in another house on the SubDude with lots of bass traps and it's pretty darn impressive. Just checking by ear the response in that rooms seems pretty even through the room, especially the mix position.

Interestingly for me, recent mixes I've done on just near field monitors that extend to 55 hz and checking the sub bass on headphones are traveling much better than mixes I did with the sub and near fields combination. I don't care how I get it, but if a mix travels well, mission accomplished.

doncolga wrote: I guess the floor upstairs may have resonated some way at various frequencies and the Subdude did help decouple some.

From the Auralex site:
Its purpose is to prevent sound from transmitting through your subwoofer to surrounding surfaces... Subwoofers create big vibrations (low frequencies) that you can feel in the floor and in objects placed nearby. When the source of the vibrations is coupled directly to the floor it causes these objects to vibrate or resonate.
In a word: hogwash. The source of said vibrations is the acoustic output of the speaker, not vibrating panels. Only if the sub is a total POS would the speaker panels vibrate so badly that they need isolating.
The only useful purpose of these is if the floor is structurally weak, so that it resonates in response to the acoustic output of the sub, and said resonance causes the floor to vibrate against the sub, not the other way around.

Now that I think about it I did try a DIY subdude once with my Velodyne HGS-10. It made matters worst. I think it was that fairly hard spongy foam the they pack AVR/Amps in for shipping. Since it has a decent amount of give I thought it would work, maybe it did?

Also I guess this shows mid to high end manufacturers of residential speakers either have built in issues by design or its marketing departments gone wild again.

So the Totem Acoustics chromium sphere triangular energy damping vortex of awesomeness may not be up to snuff?!?

If you think that's funny, I still can't decide if this site is the ultimate in cynicism or the ultimate in self-delusion: http://www.machinadynamica.com/index.html ...

All I can go by is what I heard, and in that upstairs room, I could hear an improvement with it. Downstairs on the foundation the sub had the smoothest response of any room I'd ever heard it in and I couldn't tell any difference with or without the subdude. Perhaps the room helped and I feel sure the solid floor did.

The MachinaDynamica website for audio is analgous to...

The Church of The Sub-Genius website for religion...

http://www.subgenius.com/