In this article, we will help you understand how to choose the best IsoAcoustics product for your system. IsoAcoustics is a Canadian company that, as the name implies, specializes in isolation devices for home and professional speakers and components. In the world of performance products, IsoAcoustics is relatively new, only having been formed in 2012, but the people behind the brand have been in the business for decades.
They developed a patented technology to improve sound by reducing vibrations that came from years of work in the broadcast industry. Dave Morrison, who is the man behind most of the IsoAcoustics work was part of a team tasked with building the largest multi-media center in the world at 1.72 million square feet! They had to figure out how to isolate all of the recording studios, special effects studios, and TV and radio studios. It was a task that led Dave to come up with some unique ideas on sound isolation.
If you know a little about the Canadian tech market, you are probably aware of the NRC, Canada’s national research center designed to help Canadian companies who export around the world. Many Canadian speaker and electronics companies use their facilities to design and test equipment and IsoAcoustics has used them for a wide range of testing.
For those of you who already know you want to get some IsoAcoustics products for your system and just want to know how to pick the best ones, you can skip the next section. If you do want to learn more about how they work and the benefits, keep on reading!
How IsoAcoustics Products Work
When you think about isolating speakers there are usually two things that quickly come to mind. Is the speaker exciting the surface they are sitting on, causing that surface to make sounds that are not part of the recording? The other part of isolation is thinking about how to keep the surface the speaker is on from sending the sound into another room. When a recording studio has multiple rooms, they will actually float the rooms to help isolate them.
The first two parts of isolation have been addressed by many companies and there are known technologies that work well. Spiking a speaker or putting it on a speaker stand is one easy way to isolate it from the floor which in almost all cases will offer big sound improvements.
IsoAcoustics looked at a third aspect no one had really thought about. Think of this example. You attach a steel pipe to a concrete wall with a plate. This is akin to a spike on a speaker. If you bang the pipe with a mallet the vibrations will go down the pipe, enter the wall and reflect back up the pipe. IsoAcoustics wanted to address the vibrations that reflect back into the speaker or components from the surface it is sitting on.
They found through testing at the NRC these reflections coming back into a speaker had a pretty big impact on the sound. Through laser testing, they discovered the reflections actually caused the cabinets of the speakers to oscillate. The tests were really interesting in that for the control test, they hung a speaker on bungee cords to isolate it, then compared it with sitting on spikes, nothing, and using their products. If you are geeks like us, they have a pretty interesting white paper called IsoAcoustics Technology Explained.
IsoAcoustics award-winning patented isolation products come in many different configurations and sizes. They all are designed to manage the energy coming back into the speaker or component while also addressing the first two aspects of isolation we discussed as well.
The difference you hear when you compare with and without is tighter bass, much greater clarity and openness to the sound, and far better three-dimensional imaging. It's pretty dramatic in most cases. IsoAcoustics have a huge amount of positive comments from recording engineers who use them daily in their work, so it’s hard to dispute the pros!
Now let’s take a look at the models to determine which one is best for your system.
