Decoupling Gliders vs Spikes Alone for Speakers

Why use Herbie's Gliders over just spikes?

Cone/Spike Decoupling Gliders, Threaded Stud Gliders, and Little/Giant Fat Gliders will help to hold the speaker cabinet and baffle steadier, reducing distortion. The idea is to keep the baffle that the speakers are mounted to as motionless as possible for the cones to render the music most accurately.

Spike feet do not have much capacity to absorb and reduce speaker driver-generated cabinet vibrations. Some vibration is 'drained' to the floor, yet the floor, whether hardwood or concrete, will resonate some of those vibrations right back up the spikes the way they came and introduce both coloration and distortion to the music. Much of the vibration that causes a lot of distortion is higher-frequency, acute micro-vibration that you cannot really feel or readily detect. dBNeutralizer very effectively arrests these vibrations as well as a considerable amount of the more 'macro'- type vibrations. Having Decoupling Gliders between the spikes and floor physically absorbs a substantial amount of cabinet vibration, allowing the speaker baffles and the cabinet itself to remain more motionless in place, and eliminates any reverberation from the floor affecting the speakers. The Gliders also eliminate speaker-generated floorborne vibrations that can affect your other audio components.

With an effective and efficient isolation/decoupling of the loudspeakers, you'll get a better defined, more linear, and deeply extending bass with general improvements throughout the audio spectrum, bringing out more of the speakers' inherent potential. A little more life-like with more of the intangible ambience that helps to define a live sound, more faithful to the originally recorded event.

Spikes vs. rubbery feet

Spiking speakers to the floor instead of using a rubbery isolation material is an old-school golden rule. Compared to rubber feet, for example, spikes will generally give you a much more linear and better-defined sonic result, better focus and imaging, greater detail. Compared to the recorded source, however, spikes give you a compromise. For the benefit, you also have some detriment: you'll usually have a more harsh, rigid musical rendering, with some coloration depending on the spike material and floor composition -- and with some higher-frequency, acute micro-distortion you'll lose a bit of the ambient intangibles in the decay of notes, atmosphere and tonal textures.

Herbie's Audio Lab doesn't believe in trade-offs -- only improvements, and that's why our products feature an isolation material formulated specifically for loudspeaker use. Cone/Spike Decoupling Gliders, Threaded Stud Gliders, and Fat Gliders are an improvement over spikes alone, just as spikes are an improvement over rubber feet.