Do Your Speakers Really Need To Be Isolated?

Through the years I’ve learned a lot about everything audio from some great teachers – wisdom that I’ve passed on in many of my books as well. One piece of acoustic info that seems to be taken as a fact industry-wide is that your listening experience can be greatly improved by isolating your speakers from whatever it is they’re standing on. A new article on Production Expert calls in to question the practice though, with a lot of evidence that speaker isolation doesn’t provide the acoustic benefits that many of us anticipate.

The article actually pits Dave Mastrodonato from DSMD on the “for iso” side against well-respected Ethan Winer, who’s a principle in Real Traps, on the “against” side. There’s also an interesting poll of Production Expert readers about their usage of speaker isolation.

As you can see from the image below, the differences between no isolation (in blue) versus a number of different speaker isolation methods from dead cheap (cardboard box) to fairly expensive isn’t all that much.

In some case, some of the frequency response dips are slightly less deep, but those are offset by slight peaks that occur at other frequencies. The most changes that occur are in the 20Hz to 30Hz range, which aren’t really a factor in systems not using a sub.

Now the frequency response and harmonic distortion plots from DSMD below showed a slightly different story. Again on the frequency response plot we see that most correction was done in the 20Hz to 30Hz range, and a tiny bit at 2.5kHz, which actually could be critical during playback. The harmonic distortion chart provided a different story however, with DMSD 60 Decouplers providing a smoother response in the upper midrange, but what appears to be significant ringing above 5kHz.

The full article is worth a read, but I’d say that after studying it that while speaker isolators may not provide a huge difference in speaker response (if we hear a lot it may be the placebo effect taking place), they’re probably still worth using. That said, this might be a case where something inexpensive is just as good as the expensive.

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