Couple or isolate speaker and stand?

[Will2campb]

Is it better to couple a bookshelf speaker to a stand with bolts or to isolate the speaker from the stand using materials like Herbie’s fat dots or IsoAcoustics orea devices?

 

[NTK]

Welcome to ASR!

I prefer to rigidly mount (restrain) bookshelf speakers to stands, purely for the reason of security. It is less easy to knock over the speakers and have them fall off the stands. There will be no audible difference either way.

If you have hard flooring, I'd recommend having damping pads (e.g. Sorbothane pads) between the stands and the floor. If you have carpet, spikes will work too. (Spikes on plates on hard flooring is, IMHO, a bad idea.) One possible problem with spikes is that they work by transferring (and dissipating) the vibrational energy into the build structure, and may cause rattling in the pictures hanging on the wall, dishes in the cabinet, etc. But this is much less of an issue for stand mount bookshelves than for huge subwoofers pumping out 105+ dB SPL low bass.

 

[Frank Dernie]

Is it better to couple a bookshelf speaker to a stand with bolts or to isolate the speaker from the stand using materials like Herbie’s fat dots or IsoAcoustics orea devices?

Decoupled will be more accurate, Genelec supply their speakers with their iso-pod isolators.
Coupling speakers to their stand may be OK if the stands are damped and don't ring, otherwise you have coupled them to tubular bells (if they are metal) which will "join in" whenever a note of their pitch is played. Coupling to a wooden floor also gives inaccurate bass bloat.