Loudspeaker Coupling & Decoupling

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Understanding Loudspeaker Coupling/Decoupling Gary Leonard Koh, CEO Introduction This is a question that I get asked a lot – what do I have to do to properly stabilize a pair of loudspeakers? Floor-standing speakers are sometimes supplied with feet and spikes already installed, or they have inserts to allow spikes to be screwed into the cabinet. How effective are spikes? With your stand-mounted monitor (bookshelf) loudspeakers, what stands do I use? What do I use to couple/decouple the loudspeaker to the stand? This paper attempts to bring a bit more clarity to the subject. Definitions Couple – to “make as one” as in coupling a loudspeaker to a loudspeaker stand makes the stand and the loudspeaker as one. Coupling the loudspeaker to the floor makes like the loudspeaker is a part of the floor, and coupling the loudspeaker to the loudspeaker stand makes the stand a part of the loudspeaker – like it has suddenly grown feet. The opposite is to de-couple – where there is absolutely no relationship. Using an antigravity generator to float the loudspeaker is an example of de-coupling. Even magnetic levitation has some degree of coupling. Absolute de-coupling is impossible using current technology. So, for the real-world purposes of understanding loudspeaker coupling/decoupling, there is no perfect coupler and there is no perfect de-coupler. The Musical Context We must consider that the context of our discussion to be that the loudspeaker is playing music, and not sine waves. Sine waves are symmetric. Music is never symmetric. Music is transient and chaotic. For example, common sense tells us that a plucked guitar string, a bass drum hit, a struck piano key all have a much larger initial positivegoing wave than the negative wave. Looking at the waveform of a piano note, it is easy to see that there is more energy in the positive-going wave. As the note decays,

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