![]() ![]() I moved the speakers so that they were directly on the hardwood floor with the area rug just in front of them. But the speakers themselves were not the most secure and could slide a bit on the area rug.Įnter the Gaias. Apart from the eyesore of hockey pucks in our living room, they really did work and improved the bass response to be less boomy. Finally, with do-it-yourself experiments, I achieved more improvement with a classic Canadian DIY tweak: eight hockey pucks. I was gifted small lead speaker spike discs that I put directly on the rug and that helped with balance and isolation given that the room itself was not perfectly level. I then tried the speakers on a Persian area rug with the spikes directly on it. The boomy bass was somewhat corrected by moving the speakers out even further from the wall, almost four feet into the living room. This resulted in a boomy bass and fairly unrefined soundstage. Initially, my speakers rested on the spikes provided on top of quarters on the hardwood floor in the living room. This is not my first attempt at speaker isolation. But as Cauchon also mentioned, “the rule of thumb is to have a 10% margin” so if your speaker weight is within 10% of the weight limit, the recommendation is to use the next size up for best results since the weight of a speaker is often not equally distributed between the spikes. Each speaker weighs about 80 pounds and so this fits within the Gaia II specifications of a weight capacity between 70-120 pounds. I used the Gaia II isolators on my Soliloquy 5.3 speakers. But I was curious to see if speaker isolation could provide another dimension to the music and what would happen to the clarity in my listening room with the Gaias. In fact, like most audiophiles, I would say the speaker itself probably accounts for most of the changes in sound in a system. In other words, the sound of music in your listening room should change but the character of your speakers should not. The Gaia technology, according to François Cauchon, Canadian National Sales Manager, are “designed to decouple the component or speaker from its connecting surface, allowing it to float independently.” By doing this, the thought is that firstly, sound reflections coming back from the supporting surface, like a hardwood floor, are “attenuated to eliminate smear, providing greater sound clarity and openness.” Secondly, by giving the speakers themselves more isolation and thus more prevention of lateral movement and oscillation, particularly from bass production, there should be “greater clarity and focus.” Further, isoAcoustics’s frequency response testing from inside the anechoic chamber of Canada’s National Research Council claims that the Gaias do not add sound colorization and that they track with the original spikes with which the speakers are provided. These disc shaped weights, with a suction cup technology built in for additional stabilization, screw in and attach to most floorstanding speakers or bookshelf speaker stands. The final product I reviewed from IsoAcoustics were its flagship product, the Gaia speaker isolators. ![]() IsoAcoustics Part 3: The Gaia II Speaker Isolators by Jamie Gillies ![]()
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