Using The Ringmat Feet and Domes As Speaker Supports hi-fi+ technical review

Back in the mists of time the earth was flat - truth. Why was it true? Because everybody knew it, and something that everyone knows has to be true. Now the Earth may have miraculously rounded itself off, and the dragons at the edge of the world may be no more, but we still have our own truths that everyone knows. Look back to the late seventies, when everybody (in the UK) knew that the Linn LP12 was the best turntable that anyone could buy. Around this time, any other turntable was an also ran as far as the press was concerned, and by inference so was any other turntable manufacturer. The only chance for such a company to survive was to produce 'me too' products, meaning belt drive, suspended sub-chassis, etc. etc. Fast forward to the present, and very few of the worlds high-end turntables utilise a suspended sub-chassis, even if belt drive is still de riguer. The fact is that no-one has found the undisputed magic formula for turntable design, and each approach has its benefits and disadvantages, so, as in cooking, the end result depends not so much on the base ingredients, but on the skill of the chef.

And the purpose of this preamble? To discuss another one of those `truths', i.e. that the only way to make speakers sound good is to spike them to the floor (via a stand in the case of smaller speakers). Before you dismiss this as the ramblings of a demented idiot, it's worth noting that not only is there a groundswell of designers out in Europe who are eschewing the now traditional spiked approach, but also here in the UK, Max Townshend has been making air suspended speaker platforms for some time. In fact RG and DD favourably reviewed a system using these platforms way back in Issue 3. Now we have Ringmat advocating the use of their feet and domes under speakers, as well as hi-fi-accessories.com suggesting that their cd-str5 feet, reviewed on page 100 (issue 16), can also be successfully used as speaker supports.

So what's going on? Have these people suddenly taken leave of their senses? After all, everybody knows that the only way to support speakers is on spikes. In order to understand this thinking it is necessary to wind the clock back to those flat earth days of yore, when the LP12 was the king of all it surveyed, and when the discussion of support furniture was limited to the turntable and Ivor Tiefenbrun recommended that the LP12 be used atop a light coffee table. In those days floorstanding speakers would have plastic feet which would rest directly on your carpet or floor. You would rarely even find any adjustment for levelling. Bookshelf speakers were just that, and speaker stands were viewed, in the main, as a method of raising the tweeter to ear height. Speakers atop such stands would often wobble about frighteningly at the merest touch.

Spikes provide a better energy interface to wooden floors by virtue of the fact that they tend to bury themselves into the surface, forming a friction bond between the two. This has the unfortunate side effect with floorstanders that the speaker will be effectively sprung by the floorboards, and every spring has a resonant frequency which can be excited. On my floor, with my speakers, this resonant frequency is about 50 Hz. Finally, the four corners of the base of a speaker cabinet are not necessarily the ideal points at which to drain the energy within the system.

Now it is an immutable fact in our physical world that energy cannot be lost. It can be transmitted and it can be converted from one form into another, but not lost. So these are your two options when trying to deal with unwanted energy In the case of spiking, the theory is that it will allow energy transmission into the physical structure of the floor, removing it from the cabinet and out of harms way, but energy transmission is easier said than done, especially at interface points such as the contact point between the spike and the floor. In fact you are just as likely to get the energy reflected back into the system as transmitted out of it if you are not careful. Try hitting a concrete block with a small metal hammer to see what I mean, not only does it bounce off, but the resulting feedback will vibrate up the handle into your hand and up your arm. Apply this to a speaker and you can easily see that the results are certainly going to be unfortunate.

The alternative method is to try and convert the energy into a less harmful form, typically heat. This is the thinking behind the sand filled cabinet walls advocated in the past by Gilbert Briggs and others. Sand is a great medium for converting movement energy into heat via friction. One of the major problems with such an approach is that the cabinets are incredibly difficult to produce, and thus very expensive. Also it does not stop the entire cabinet moving in response to vibrational energy, although its extra weight would reduce such movement. Thus the effect tends to be to concentrate resonant energy as much as to dissipate it. I, for one, won't be holding my breath waiting to see an affordable product using such an approach to hit the high street.

So to sum up, spiking speakers may stop gross cabinet movement, but the solution is not without problems of its own, and it's these problems that the dissenters are trying to solve. In the case of the Ringmat feet and domes, the solution is to couple the speakers to the stand or floor using a lossy mechanism, one that will not allow energy to be reflected back into the system, effectively providing the speaker with a suspension of its own.

So how do we use such a system without reacquiring all the pre-spike problems? I have strong views about this. The feet and domes should be inserted between the speaker cabinet and support, and this means different things for floorstand and standmount speakers.

For floorstanders, if you have no carpet, and your floor is fairly level, then you can simply place the feet on the floor with the domes flat side down on top. The speaker will then sit directly on top, and levelling can be achieved by slight repositioning of the feet under the speaker to redistribute the weight. The speakers will wobble, but the frequency should be in the range 5-10 Hz, meaning that it shouldn't be excited by the speaker output. If you have carpet, or an uneven floor, then a plinth is going to be necessary, which should be spiked as normal. This then provides a stable platform for the feet to sit on. The spike problems discussed above will not be a problem, as the amount of energy actually transmitted into the plinth will be minimal.

For stand mounted speakers, the stand should be left spiked to the floor as normal, the feet and domes are placed on the top plate of the stand (after removing any upward facing spikes), and the speaker should sit on top of these. The principle is exactly the same as before, we want to produce a very stable platform, but with a clearly specified amount of de-coupling between the speaker cabinet and the stand. Bear in mind that this isn't going to work with skeletal stands, as the feet must have enough surface area to sit correctly.

As luck would have it, the Audiovector floorstanding speakers I use already have a spiked plinth. As originally supplied, this plinth is firmly screwed to the bottom of the cabinet, but with spacers separating the two by about 1 cm. This was ideal for me, as I have a carpeted and very uneven floor, so I unscrewed the plinths from the bottom of the cabinets, removed the spacers, and replaced them with the Ringmat feet and domes. I used four of each per speaker, as the unusual shape of the Audiovectors made the whole system unstable when I only used three. The whole operation only took me around two hours, although I had to rope my son in when it came to actually siting the speakers on the domes.

I wasn't too sure what to expect when I settled back to listen. I hadn't reread RGs experience of the Townshend platforms deliberately so I wouldn't be influenced by the article. First up on the system, a bit of Skunk Anansie and `Charlie Big Potato'. This track has a staccato rhythm that is very hard to reproduce. To be honest I was disappointed, the bass drum lacked impact and a level of excitement seemed to have been stripped away. What I hadn't bargained for is that the feet and domes needs to run in, which in the case of this application seems to mean that they need to settle under the weight of the speaker cabinets. Left alone for a couple of days, and after checking the speakers were still level, I tried again. Now the bass drum had impact aplenty, but the presentation had changed. Instead of being all skin and thud, it now had weight, timbre, and decay. In fact it was like the difference between using a kick drum with and without a sandbag inside (sandbags are often used to deaden kick drums for live performances). In fact the separation between bass drum and bass guitar was much more marked, each floating free, making the rhythm much less mechanical, and far more like real musicians playing together. However this was not at the expense of the tightness of the rhythm section, which still stopped and started in a pinhead. Elsewhere in the spectrum a layer of aural grit had been removed, adding sweetness to Skin's voice plus a layer of acoustic that had gone previously unnoticed. Also some of the edginess to the rhythm guitar had been removed, which could be perceived by some as robbing the track of a little excitement, but I felt that the presentation was truer to the original, and this kind of false excitement generated by having a few rough and ready leading edges to a system can be very wearing on a long listening session.

Moving across to vinyl, 'Backstreet Slide' from the Richard and Linda Thompson Album Shoot Out The Lights was an even better illustration of the benefits of the de-coupling. On this track the kick drum is very weighty, and fairly prominent in the mix and it can be overpowering on an unbalanced system. Add to that Thompson's fierce guitar and Linda's vocal, and you have a recipe for a serious headache. Up till now my system always felt on the edge with this song, the guitar always a little shrill and course, Linda's vocal thin and recessed, the kick drum thudding out slightly removed from the rest of the action. With the Ringmat products in place, suddenly there was coherence. The kick drum given more depth whilst being reigned back, letting it rejoin the rest of the instruments, Richard's guitar was given more depth, losing its sting without losing the attack. Linda stepped forward to take her place as lead vocalist.

But, and there is a but, this is, one of those situations where a short A/B comparison could lead you to the conclusion that the use of the Ringmat products is detrimental to the sound. By evening out the energy spectrum, and removing the edginess from the system, a quick comparison may prove disappointing. This is akin to the way that brighter speakers can appeal on the shop floor. However, over the long term it becomes apparent that in fact there is nothing missing, and that what has been removed shouldn't have been there in the first place.

The Ringmat domes and feet come in at around UK£115 per complete set (4), and you will need two sets for a pair of speakers. Once they have settled in, no further adjustment is required. But bear in mind that the feet will only support a maximum of 22kg*. There is an extra heavy duty version on the way though. In the context of my system, this is an absolute bargain. Since using them I have harboured no desire to go back to the prior arrangement, so score another one for the de-coupling brigade.

* For ideal results.