Shiro Nakamura, is the world-famous car designer who produced numerous masterpieces such as GT-R and FairladyZ at Isuzu Motors and Nissan Motors.
He also has a deep knowledge of music, is an amateur jazz bassist, and performs classical cello. And, because he uses Wellfloat for Instruments regularly, he decided to work on designing Babel as the ultimate Isolation platform to be the best in the world.
SOUND IMPROVEMENT
When you add WELLFLOAT to your loudspeakers, you should be able to recognise a new and previously unheard beauty of sound. This experience will make you realise that it was previously masked by distortion and the true musical performance was there but hidden. No other products in this category have ever been able to demonstrate such a clear difference.
WELLFLOAT gives a much clearer focus on the sound stage by reducing distortion. The impact on the bass frequency may sound different depending on the size of your speakers. For smaller speakers with WELLFLOAT, you can hear more bass as the loss of energy is minimal. For larger speakers, the bass volume will become tighter and more controlled, so you can hear what the true performance of the speakers is. We hope you experience this.
We have a very good and reproducible example. The Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, was very famous for playing Bach. His piano seemed to have been specially tuned. On his CD, “The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I”, when played on normal Hi-Fi systems there appears to be no difference between all the pieces.
However, introduce WELLFLOAT underneath the speakers, and carefully listen to some pieces again. Prelude No.1 in C Major has third and fifth chord and you should be able to recognise a “beat” due to interference of the frequencies, this doesn’t happen in Prelude No. 8 in E-Flat Minor where all the notes are beautifully reproduced without any beat. Then compare to other recordings of this piece, such as by Mieczysław Horszowski or Valery Afanassiev. Interestingly, the result is completely the opposite and Prelude No. 1 in C Major doesn’t have a beat and Prelude No. 8 in E-Flat Minor has lots of beats.
With WELLFLOAT, you cannot stop yourself playing all the versions in your library to check!
Fundamental mechanism 1 – Isolation between device and floor
Putting the speakers directly on the floor or stands with no concern. Is that correct?
The energy of vibration is lost loss little by little as it travels through feet, stands, insulators or spikes, and the energy finally becomes zero when arrives at the ground. With each step different vibration and sub-harmonics will be added based on type of materials, weight, etc. and this will generate distortion at every point. Due to these accumulated distortions, the total output will be heavily distorted and coloured. You may feel some “strongness” or a “pushy sound” from the speakers standing directly on the floor, but this is based on the distortion not on the speakers’ true performance. Some people may like it for a short period of listening, but not for longer term enjoyment. In order to resolve the issue, it is required to completely isolate the vibration generated by the speaker and vibration generated by the floor. There are several ways to achieve this. Let’s think about how best we can do it.
1. Hang the speaker on the ceiling: Technically a good idea, but not realistic in the majority of listening environments as the mechanism is too big. Also, there may be side effects due to the size with so many factors such as material of wire, length, divided vibration, etc. that need to be carefully considered.
2. Float the speakers with a magnet; The magnetic force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance. As the distance from the magnet increases, the repulsive force of the magnetic force decreases, and as the distance approaches, the repulsive force increases. It is a bit confusing and very important to note that the strength of the force that weakens the repulsive force when the distance of 1 mm increases and the strength of the force that increases the repulsive force when the distance of 1mm approaches are not the same. This is because the distances from the magnet are different so it will never be symmetric or linear. The device floating on the magnet doesn’t have centre position so there’s no guarantee that it would return to the same position. Therefore, moving up and down (push-pull) behaves differently and not symmetrical, which would generate micro distortion. Also, the speaker itself is driven by magnet force and so it is difficult to place another magnet in the same field without negatively affecting each other.
3. Put rubber or a spring underneath the speaker; Elastic materials such as rubber absorb vibration by deforming. However, it requires a certain amount of force to start deforming, and no absorption happens until then, which means that micro vibration cannot be absorbed. Also, elastic materials have 3-dimensional distortion by their nature. For springs, resonance generated by itself needs to be considered.
As such, it is very challenging to practically isolate the vibrations between speakers and the floor. WELLFLOAT has succeeded by installing a very small mechanism inside of the board and has effectively achieved “1. Hang the speaker on the ceiling” with minimum side effect.
Fundamental mechanism 2 – Pendulum movement and Distortion
What is the reason why the pendulum movement can remove distortion?
Let’s look at the correlation between the diaphragm and the enclosure of the speakers. For example, if the diaphragm is 20g and the cabinet is 20kg, the difference between them is 1000 times. Force of action by the diaphragm and reaction by the cabinet should be balanced. The weight of the diaphragm is very small and its movement when the speaker is playing is large enough to check by the naked eye. On the other hand, the cabinet is much heavier and not easy to move even with the force of the diaphragm. You can feel the vibration by touching it, but its movement is very small and invisible. This is due to the difference of the weight between the diaphragm and cabinet. Here, force is calculated as weight x speed. Acceleration is the magnitude of movement, that is, the distance traveled twice differentiated per unit time. The cabinet has 1000 times of weight, which makes the magnitude of movement as 1/1000 times. This is the reason why the movement is small and invisible.
All the values so far are theoretical based on an ideal environment. Obviously it is different in the real world as the speaker normally stands directly on the floor or feet and cannot move freely. When the speaker stands firm on the floor or feet, reaction from the floor or feet will add an amount of vibration between them and therefore create distortion.
When you use WELLFLOAT, the cantilever inside converts the directions of the vibration coming from all the directions to solely the ones in a horizontal direction by restricting vertical vibration, this allows the cabinet of the speaker to move freely only in the horizontal directions and releases all the stress and distortion coming back from floor and stand, allowing it to behave almost ideally.
You can imagine a cannon or a gun firing. Cannons have a recoil system to absorb the shock generated by firing. This protects the cannon from being moved or even broken by its shock. The same thing is happening to the speaker in monocular level.
Please have a look at the following graph. The cantilever of WELLFLOAT converts any diaphragm/cabinet movement to pendulum movement linearly in all the audible frequencies. Therefore, the impulse reaction will be accurate and there should in theory be no distortion.
1. Friction on/under WELLFLOAT
In order to achieve the best sound quality with WELLFLOAT, it is highly recommended to fit WELLFLOAT , the device and the floor in a manner such that they work as much as possible as a united system. The diaphragm of a speaker vibrates mostly in a horizontal direction. If the WELLFLOAT board and the speaker are not working together, the physical position of the speaker will move. Additionally any unwanted vibration due to a gap between WELLFLOAT and speakers will cause loss of energy and the pendulum movement will not work perfectly, meaning it cannot achieve the best sound quality. The “L” series of WELLFLOAT board is recommended whenever available as it has special coating on its surface so it easily fits into almost any type of devices to firmly grip and minimise slippage, giving best performance. If you plan to use spikes, it is important to make sure that the spikes are firmly fixed to WELLFLOAT and don’t easily move.
2. Is it as effective in use with other devices such as amplifiers and players?
We are happily committed to the belief that WELLFLOAT is not only for loudspeakers. Many end users have reported that WELLFLOAT is effective for almost any type of HiFi device that uses with a motor mechanism such as turntables, CD players, Hard disk drives, and so on. WELLFLOAT is also effective for amplifier, DAC, cables, etc., which don’t have any motors at all. We believe that any device working with an electrical current has internal physical vibrations that are affecting each other.
3. Can WELLFLOAT be used upside down?
WELLFLOAT has a U-shaped spring inside specifically designed to convert the direction of vibration to the horizontal. This U-shaped spring is this direction taking into account gravity. If the mechanism is upside down, WELLFLOAT will not function properly. It is very important to make sure that WELLFLOAT is NOT upside down and keep the suggested directions. As long as the directions of up and down are correct, you can place WELLFLOAT in any directions in a horizontal way without any compromise of the performance. Please refer to the following diagram for more details on what’s happening inside our mechanism.