Speakers on a stumped timber floor

My gear is on a suspended wood floor (crawlspace below) covered by thick carpet. The floor is solid and I don't have issues with foot traffic having my TT sitting on a floor rack. Based on a suggestion from Huge, I moved the spiked plinths of my speakers from the carpet onto heavy concrete tiles. They are cheap stepping stones from Home Depot, about 18"x12"x1.5" thick. I was surprised. Got a subtle but immediately noticeable increase in the clarity of the speakers. I guess my next move might be to try to affix three spikes to the bottom of the concrete tiles and see what I find.

Another user with a very sprung floor. So much so that furniture noticeably rocks when you walk by it.

Sprung floors are less than ideal and there are limited ways to deal with them.

• Put heavy plinths under the speakers to stablise that section of floor. Can be unsightly so your acceptance of this will vary. Does not address the rest of the room's floor.
• Change the speakers to match the room's natural tuning. This is what I did. I chose a pair with a lighter touch that doesn't set the floor off at certain frequencies. Fairly sure I would buy different speakers if I had a different room.
• Hold out until you can build a room to spec. This will be my next project on the new home.

Bass traps can also help but they can also be unsightly and since they mainlly eliminate standing waves in the room itself, a resonating floor might still present some problems for that.

I think that if you can feel the bass through the floor then that isn't good news and will add significant colouration to the sound.  Putting the speakers onto concrete slabs, as suggested in another posting, would be an easy and cheap thing to try, although what you then do if you like the sonic result but your partner doesn't like the way they look, is another matter!

But I would certainly give it a try.  If the rest of the floor is carpeted, then I think the direct excitation of that by the loudspeakers, other than through the spikes, will be an order less.

best

David

Another thought, which may not be practicable in your circumstance, would be to put support directly under the floor under the loudspeakers.  You could think of this as a couple of extra stumps, although I would probably cast concrete blocks under there if I were doing it (or to be more accurate, I would pay someone younger than me to do the casting!)

Acrow props are cheap!

I like your thinking Chris!

I'm mostly a lurker here, but the OP's issue is close to one I've experienced and solved (cheaply).

I live in a 500 year old building in Italy, in a very large apartment. The apartment has wood floors over a very old type of masonry called solaio that involves overlapping layers of brick-like material shaped into tiles. It's a very rigid structure that was used in floors, ceilings and walls, but despite its rigidity and weight, it resonates to bass like the dickens. My listening room is about 60 square meters with 3.5 meter ceilings, and to say that the vibrations made for less-than-perfect listening would be a gross understatement. I also couldn't play anything at volume because the neighbors would yell at me in Italian.

I'm running a pair of 2007 Fidelity Acoustic floor-standing speakers -- very nice two-way transmission line speakers with their own concrete bases -- and a modest REL 205 sub on spikes. System is driven by a Supernait of the same vintage. The speakers' concrete bases didn't do nearly enough to ameliorate the problem, and neither did the REL's spikes.

A friend suggested that I get hold of a Subdude II (about 65 euros from Woodbrass in France, if I recall) to use as a base for the REL. I also added stupidly cheap Fisual hemispherical feet to the concrete bases of each of the speakers (total cost was around 24 euros for two four-packs). I sourced those from Amazon.

The vibrations simply vanished. Our neighbors could no longer hear or feel any vibration, even at volume, and neither could we; the annoying resonance died an immediate and timely death. Sound quality improved dramatically, with staging and imaging become lighter, airier and clearer, and the bass became much tighter and more "real" -- effortless.

Your mileage may vary because of the construction of your place, but for about 90 euros in total, I found this to be an excellent solution -- and it's cheap enough to be worth a try before changing the framing/flooring. Of course, the carpet will have to go...