JP Denon blog claims that feet/spikes improve audio quality of speakers and other audio equipments. Is that true?

[vroad]

Is this even remotely true? I doubt it. For CD players, maybe those feet help a little if the speakers are on the same shelf, but why put cables/power amps on them?
The article even calims that materials and shapes of the feet, how many number of points (3 or 4 points) you use to support the equipment, also matters a lot.

The article refers to feet/spikes as "insulators". Somehow those products seem to be called differently in Japan.

For speaker feet, I've seen Ethan Winer's article on expensive speaker isolation products:

Testing Loudspeaker Isolation Products

ethanwiner.com

Ethan says that the majority of sound comes from speaker driver's cone. If so how wooden feet make the sound warm and metal ones make the sound clearer, like Denon blog article claims?

I doubt that speaker feet matters a lot in most cases at least for speakers, as long as the speaker is a good one, is placed on a sturdy speaker stand, and is not audibly rattling.
If the speaker is not very great and has not enough damping material in it, using expensive feet probably won't help.
If the speaker has already good amount of damping material in it, then feet probably won't matter much in terms of audio quality.

If the speakers are on a desk, feet might help in preventing you from feeling the vibration transmitted from the speakers, even when it's not rattling.

I attached screen shots of blog articles translated to English with Google Translate.
If you want to read full article in English you could use Google Translate or DeepL for that.

Denon™ Home Theater | Enhance the Entertainment Experience

Denon is a leading manufacturer of high-quality home audio, home theatre, and personal audio products. Shop our range of speakers, receivers, and more.

www.denon.jp

Speaker placement article also says the same thing about "insulators".

Denon™ Home Theater | Enhance the Entertainment Experience

Denon is a leading manufacturer of high-quality home audio, home theatre, and personal audio products. Shop our range of speakers, receivers, and more.

www.denon.jp

 

[GXAlan]

It’s probably exaggerated but what might be accurate and reasonable is this

“suppresses the transmission of vibration between the two speakers”

In their setup on that table, and presumably the design of many Japanese homes, maybe the resonances from one speaker can affect the other.

 

[Ken Tajalli]

From what I remember, spikes on speakers were designed to penetrate carpets, to seat the speakers firmly on the floor-boards.
It was argued that the flexible carpet would allow the speaker cabinet/baffle to dance back and forth with music muddying up bass.
There was some truth to that.
But on amps and CD players, it was a marketing ploy to cash in on the idea.

 

[JSmith]

But on amps and CD players, it was a marketing ploy to cash in on the idea.

From what I hear the only thing that works for CD's is the green marker trick.

JSmith

 

[Ken Tajalli]

From what I hear the only thing that works for CD's is the green marker trick.

View attachment 370509


JSmith

Oh yes!
I had one of those pens.
worked wonderfully, less distortion, bigger soundstage ....

 

[vroad]

It’s probably exaggerated but what might be accurate and reasonable is this

“suppresses the transmission of vibration between the two speakers”

In their setup on that table, and presumably the design of many Japanese homes, maybe the resonances from one speaker can affect the other.

Even if the speaker stands are on the wooden floor, most of vibrations came from the speakers are killed by damping material inside the speakers and the stands before actually becoming a problem, unless you play extemely loud, I guess.

 

[vroad]

From what I remember, spikes on speakers were designed to penetrate carpets, to seat the speakers firmly on the floor-boards.
It was argued that the flexible carpet would allow the speaker cabinet/baffle to dance back and forth with music muddying up bass.
There was some truth to that.
But on amps and CD players, it was a marketing ploy to cash in on the idea.

But spikes won't do any good for bookshelf speakers placed on shelves like in Denon's blog article, no?

 

[GXAlan]

But spikes won't do any good for bookshelf speakers placed on shelves like in Denon's blog article, no?

“Funny thing, it produced so much bass that combined with its smooth plastic base, it slid back 1 inch on my metal stand!”

JBL HDI-1600 Speaker Review

This is a review and detailed measurements of the JBL HDI-1600 two-way bookshelf speaker. They were purchased new and drop shipped to me for testing. The HDI-1600 costs US $900 for one. Note: my company Madrona Digital is a dealer for Harman products such as JBL line (although we hardly sell...

www.audiosciencereview.com

So it’s definitely possible….

But possibility and probability are two different things.

 

[Ken Tajalli]

But spikes won't do any good for bookshelf speakers placed on shelves like in Denon's blog article, no?

I did not look at the blog.
i suppose.
Spikes were couplers, not insulators.

Just glanced at the blog, it's BS!
It is talking about cable lifters, don't waste your time on it.

 

[vroad]

I did not look at the blog.
i suppose.
Spikes were couplers, not insulators.

Just glanced at the blog, it's BS!
It is talking about cable lifters, don't waste your time on it.

Yeah it looks marketing BS to me, too.

It's sad to see that a bigger company like Denon (or D&M Holdings?) is spreading misinformation on their blog. It seems that many people in Japan only read Japanese information and don't even bother reading ASR posts or blog articles from independent experts.

I have one of their products, AVR-X3800H. While it's not recommended by amir for having worse objective performance than last gen, it's doing good enough job for me.

Denon AVR-X3800H Review

This is a review and detailed measurements of the Denon AVR-X3800H 9.4 Home Theater Audio/Video Receiver. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $1,699. Not much to say about the look of the unit as it is pretty much similar/same as last generations. Here is the back panel...

www.audiosciencereview.com

 

[DJNX]

Speakers can make things resonate. Make something with enough square meters resonate and you have yourself a phantom speaker (just like reflections).

It’s all dependent on how your room is constructed and materials. For bookshelves, sturdy stands are enough to resolve the problem.

 

[Thomas_A]

Spikes do not improve sound. Debunked long time ago.

 

[sq225917]

There's enough energy in speaker cabinets that swapping between spikes and compliant feet could reasonably make a measurable difference depending on the surface they're terminated into, concrete slab or bouncy wooden floor over cellar cavity.

In my music room compliant pads do very definitely reduce the bouncy wooden floor from singing along.

They are however the only such tweak in my hifi, nothing else gets footers, fancy shelves or anything of that nature.

 

[kemmler3D]

A well built speaker should not transmit enough vibration through the cabinet to need isolation (or coupling) to the floor.

However, not all speakers are well built.

My understanding is that if your floor is prone to re-radiating vibrations into the air (some wooden floors) then isolating feet might help a little.

If the floor is solid (concrete) but the speaker is creating audible problems by vibrating itself, spikes can help a little by helping it "stick" to the floor a little better.

To the extent there are vibrations hitting your gear, in theory certain electronic components can be microphonic and create sound of their own when vibrated. So to the extent that's actually happening (it's rare), isolating feet for gear can help a little.

Turntables sometimes need isolation from loud bass, but generally lot of that is traveling through the air, not the floor / furniture.

As usual with audiophile tweak-o nonsense, there is a kernel of truth that is poorly understood and then extrapolated beyond all reason. Isolating / coupling feet can sometimes solve problems if you have the problem, they don't enhance anything per se, and most people don't have problems with isolation in the first place.

 

[Audiofire]

Embarrassing nonsense from Denon, at least the cable insulators (seriously, in the Japanese link). Wooden insulators under the cable. Anyhow, metal spikes are a little silly to me when an elastic material absorbs resonances instead of metal that does nothing about that.

 

[Brutus6844]

From what I hear the only thing that works for CD's is the green marker trick.

View attachment 370509


JSmith

I know you're being facetious, but what in the world is/was "the green marker trick?"

 

[DVDdoug]

what in the world is/was "the green marker trick?"

It was a popular audiophile myth for awhile that it would reduce jitter or somehow improve the sound. I don't know who started or promoted it but "audiophools" will fall for anything!

Here are a couple of links I found:

Remembering the weird trick of using green felt pens on CDs to make them sound better | Alan Cross

About 20 years ago, a rumour started making the rounds of music fans. The claim was that you could make any CD sound better by taking a green felt marker

www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com

This guy seems to be a true-believer: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-04-ca-2433-story.html

Some of the links I found suggests that it could remove copy protection but I don't really believe that either. (For a short period of time some CDs were copy protected. I never run-across one and there were other ways getting around it.)

 

[Mark1]

I was thinking the speaker cabinet feet interaction with the floor affecting perceived audio quality is gimmick. But I wonder how much audio might get transferred from floor and through the body of the listener. Probably not much. In audiology they have a hearing test called "air and bone". Let's say you have decrease in hearing some frequency but it could be something in the ear drum (air detection) vs auditory nerve (auditory nerves detecting vibration). So if something solid is vibrating like a tuning fork, you can hear it very loud and clearly if it is touching your head while you might not hear it vibrating the air nearby. But I don't know if soundwaves from a speaker are strong enough to transmit through bone or if floor vibration are strong enough to travel through your body to your head.

 

[Brutus6844]

DVDdoug:
It was a popular audiophile myth for a while that it would reduce jitter or somehow improve the sound. I don't know who started or promoted it but "audiophools" will fall for anything!



Here are a couple of links I found:

Remembering the weird trick of using green felt pens on CDs to make them sound better | Alan Cross

About 20 years ago, a rumour started making the rounds of music fans. The claim was that you could make any CD sound better by taking a green felt marker

www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com

This guy seems to be a true-believer: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-04-ca-2433-story.html
Some of the links I found suggests that it could remove copy protection but I don't really believe that either. (For a short period of time some CDs were copy protected. I never run-across one and there were other ways getting around it.)

Thanks for the time and effort you spent looking those up and posting them. It's such a an unfortunate situation where someone broadcasts ANY sort of pseudoscience, with juuust enough "information," "evidence," or "science" to make the average person believe it's true...so long as they don't have any knowledge of the subject or do even a cursory examination of the claims and the "science" supporting them.

This one is a good example of the originator putting enough thought into the scam to lay down a REAL layer of science over the steaming pile of that is the actual claim. Most people don't know anything about the visual spectrum of light or its properties, but throwing out "using green to absorb red" is just fancy scientifickin' enough for most people to believe the claimant must know what they're talking about because look...they already knew that green absorbs red...that almost sounds like magic! This guy (I assume it's a guy...let's face it, we generally are the ones responsible for such shenanigans) must know what he's talking about! Thus yet another off-off label use for horse dewormer is born!

I really do appreciate the answer. I can't say I have ever heard of this before or ever noticed anyone with a bunch of green-outlineds. If I had, I'd have probably been tempted to buy a crap load of Magic Markers, rebrand them Sonic-Magic Markers, charge an audiophile-appropriate price, and have retired by now.

 

[JSmith]

I know you're being facetious, but what in the world is/was "the green marker trick?"

1996

Green CDs

Can CD sound quality be improved with green marking pens?

www.snopes.com

Tested here in 2016, NIL difference;

Painting the edge of a CD green

Some say painting the edge of a CD green makes a difference to the playback, specifically that it affects the jitter. I decided to test this myself. To this end, I burned a J-test track to a CD-R and recorded the playback. Then I painted the edge green and recorded it again. Below is the spectrum...

audiophilestyle.com

JSmith