Recently I installed Auva 50 footers under my speakers. Auva's are products from Stack Audio in UK and only sold dealer direct online. I installed these after a personal recommendation from an audio friend whose recommendations are always spot on. The Stack audio website is full of information on what the products supposedly do, along with numerous reviews and customer comments. Reviews and comments are always on the positive side, otherwise they would not be on the site. The product information is extensive. But then it is about selling a product. They do come with a 30-day money back, so it is a safe purchase. I made the purchase and installed the Auva's.
Once installed I did a slight speaker positioning adjustment, and I started listening.
It did not take too long a time to tell that something was vastly different in the music. And the vast difference is that the Auva's seemed to remove the electronic signature of the audio system. The music came alive and brought a "You are there" sound and feel to the music. This was across the board with every disc that I have played, no exceptions. Of course, the musicians are not there in the room with you quite obviously. But if you close your eyes to remove visual stimuli, the music does sound like the real natural sound of musical instruments and human voices, with nothing really added. I listen to classical and jazz, with some folk music at times. I tend to not listen to electronic popular music very much at all.
The Auva's are the real deal! They are highly recommended. I have found them to be the biggest sound improvement that I have ever made in all my many years of audio listening.
My speakers are in the pic below. They are DIY, designed in 2003 by the late Rick Craig of Selah Audio, and remade in 2018. They are simple DIY speakers nothing too fancy. They are a 2 1/2-way design with Seas W18E and Hiquphon OW,1. They are reasonably similar to Troel's CNO25, though my design predate Troel's by a long time. The spearkers are driven by a Starkrimson Ultra amplifier. All music is DSD64, DSD128 or DSD256 supplied by the Marantz SA KI-Ruby player.
I should add the following disclaimer:
I fully understand that my observations are worthless anecdotal observations and are completely unsupported by any graph, measurement, or any such thing. I only posted because perhaps there are a few odd individual listeners who might read this and investigate for themselves.
Once installed I did a slight speaker positioning adjustment, and I started listening.
It did not take too long a time to tell that something was vastly different in the music. And the vast difference is that the Auva's seemed to remove the electronic signature of the audio system. The music came alive and brought a "You are there" sound and feel to the music. This was across the board with every disc that I have played, no exceptions. Of course, the musicians are not there in the room with you quite obviously. But if you close your eyes to remove visual stimuli, the music does sound like the real natural sound of musical instruments and human voices, with nothing really added. I listen to classical and jazz, with some folk music at times. I tend to not listen to electronic popular music very much at all.
The Auva's are the real deal! They are highly recommended. I have found them to be the biggest sound improvement that I have ever made in all my many years of audio listening.
My speakers are in the pic below. They are DIY, designed in 2003 by the late Rick Craig of Selah Audio, and remade in 2018. They are simple DIY speakers nothing too fancy. They are a 2 1/2-way design with Seas W18E and Hiquphon OW,1. They are reasonably similar to Troel's CNO25, though my design predate Troel's by a long time. The spearkers are driven by a Starkrimson Ultra amplifier. All music is DSD64, DSD128 or DSD256 supplied by the Marantz SA KI-Ruby player.
I should add the following disclaimer:
I fully understand that my observations are worthless anecdotal observations and are completely unsupported by any graph, measurement, or any such thing. I only posted because perhaps there are a few odd individual listeners who might read this and investigate for themselves.
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I just read the responses to your post elsewhere and want to say my recent experience with footers on a suspended wood floor exactly matches yours. In this case it's an Iso Acoustic model.
What was presented to you as a 'great test', while I appreciate the effort expended, was in reality nonsense. From the hip:
- what is a silicon pad and what relevance does it have to a (presumably) engineered footer?
- the AKG C411 is an inappropriate measurement device, in fact as clearly stated in its datasheet a figure-8 microphone and not a vibration-only transducer. The measurements almost certainly captured predominantly sound vibrations in the air, not the surface vibrations to which it's attached
- the baffle test picture clearly shows the AKG isn't attached to the baffle, it straddles metal driver baskets. If those measurably vibrate Revel has bigger problems.
- the blue tack used to attach the AKG to the surface under investigation almost certainly damps vibration transfer to the transducer to some degree
Most importantly, the entire notion that frequency response alone determines audibility is comical pseudo-science. Consider using frequency response to determine the audibility of distortion, noise or your system picking up AM interference. Anyone who ever walked across suspended wood knows the resonant thrum of heal hitting floor. In my listening space a dropped heal energises the floor for ~ 3 seconds. I don't need to justify this with measurements or blind tests swapping out the wood floor for concrete. Driven by a speaker stand or spike that's a constant underlay of resonant uncorrelated noise. It's actually amazing their gold standard test measured anything at all. Decibels don't add arithmetically. To see any decibel difference means the unwanted noise is approaching the level of the desired signal. That someone with nearly 12,000 posts and his background chorus still doesn't understand the basics tells all you need to know about their self-declared expertise.
Apologies for jumping on your post to vent but reading yet another Asch Conformity tribe response this morning seriously got under my skin. The self-aggrandising social behaviour you experienced today can only be damaging to real hard science acceptance.
And no more coffee for today.
What was presented to you as a 'great test', while I appreciate the effort expended, was in reality nonsense. From the hip:
- what is a silicon pad and what relevance does it have to a (presumably) engineered footer?
- the AKG C411 is an inappropriate measurement device, in fact as clearly stated in its datasheet a figure-8 microphone and not a vibration-only transducer. The measurements almost certainly captured predominantly sound vibrations in the air, not the surface vibrations to which it's attached
- the baffle test picture clearly shows the AKG isn't attached to the baffle, it straddles metal driver baskets. If those measurably vibrate Revel has bigger problems.
- the blue tack used to attach the AKG to the surface under investigation almost certainly damps vibration transfer to the transducer to some degree
Most importantly, the entire notion that frequency response alone determines audibility is comical pseudo-science. Consider using frequency response to determine the audibility of distortion, noise or your system picking up AM interference. Anyone who ever walked across suspended wood knows the resonant thrum of heal hitting floor. In my listening space a dropped heal energises the floor for ~ 3 seconds. I don't need to justify this with measurements or blind tests swapping out the wood floor for concrete. Driven by a speaker stand or spike that's a constant underlay of resonant uncorrelated noise. It's actually amazing their gold standard test measured anything at all. Decibels don't add arithmetically. To see any decibel difference means the unwanted noise is approaching the level of the desired signal. That someone with nearly 12,000 posts and his background chorus still doesn't understand the basics tells all you need to know about their self-declared expertise.
Apologies for jumping on your post to vent but reading yet another Asch Conformity tribe response this morning seriously got under my skin. The self-aggrandising social behaviour you experienced today can only be damaging to real hard science acceptance.
And no more coffee for today.
Thank you for your well-considered post.
The response to my original post is clearly a lot different here than at ASR. Over there the responses reached comical proportions rather quickly.
But I made my post mostly because the only posts on the Auva's were the two that I mentioned in my post, nothing else. So, I wanted to provide some information there, just in case someone else did a search there, as I had done. Now, my post will come up. That might help someone, hard to really know.
When the Auva's were suggested to me, I went looking all over for more neutral information than what was available on the website. There really was not any. And my friend who suggested them did not tell me what they did for him, as he did not want to influence me, which I appreciated.
I consider forums to be very useful for sharing information to others, hopefully helpful information. I try to keep it that way.
Steve
PS. It is now just early daylight o'clock in Australia. I am going to wait awhile before checking on the ASR overnight responses. I need to build up my sense of humor first.
The response to my original post is clearly a lot different here than at ASR. Over there the responses reached comical proportions rather quickly.
But I made my post mostly because the only posts on the Auva's were the two that I mentioned in my post, nothing else. So, I wanted to provide some information there, just in case someone else did a search there, as I had done. Now, my post will come up. That might help someone, hard to really know.
When the Auva's were suggested to me, I went looking all over for more neutral information than what was available on the website. There really was not any. And my friend who suggested them did not tell me what they did for him, as he did not want to influence me, which I appreciated.
I consider forums to be very useful for sharing information to others, hopefully helpful information. I try to keep it that way.
Steve
PS. It is now just early daylight o'clock in Australia. I am going to wait awhile before checking on the ASR overnight responses. I need to build up my sense of humor first.
Almost always having builds with floating floors and very limited budgets, I used mass loading to deal with WAF friendly fake flower/whatever planters to 'kill two birds with one stone', though vinyl records, guns, beer kegs ruled in some locales.
Your cautious and gentle approach in that environment made the intent humanely clear, making the response even worse. While it does appear more tempered voices have now joined the conversation the suggestion the described audible differences are potentially attributable to the minimal height change still don't sound credible here. In my room that 'haze' was all mid-bass and below, wavelengths orders of magnitude greater than the height change. The expectation is that had you submitted the exact same same post crediting a 1-2" height change instead of absorptive footers the response would vary little. For all the site's positives its community is sadly more Social than Science focused.