While there are sound principles behind decoupling monitor speakers from the surface on which they are sitting, not everyone has had an opportunity to experience the night-and-day difference in performance between near field monitors with and without isolation. “You really need to hear it,” says Ronan Chris Murphy, who independently reviewed the IsoAcoustics ISO-L8R155 adjustable acoustic isolation speaker stands for his web-based “Ronan’s Recording Show.”
“The results were kind of mind-blowing,” reports Murphy in his recent 11-minute video review of the IsoAcoustics ISO-L8R155 decoupling stand. (Watch the video: http://ronansrecordingshow.com/2013/10/the-bbq-bible-vs-isoacoustics-iso-l8r155/)
Humorously pitting IsoAcoustics’ decoupling product against a stack of barbeque books, Murphy admits that the ISO-L8R155 stands offered improvements in speaker performance that even he had not anticipated.
“What really surprised me is that the big differences I was hearing were not the ones that I expected,” he states in the video. “Obviously I expected to hear some differences in low end; we did get clearer, more defined low end. But what kind of blew me away and made me a fan was how different the mid-range was.”
He elaborates, “Every time we switched over to the IsoAcoustic system it was smoother, it was more natural, we got more detail in the track, so we could start to hear those subtle differences between vocal harmonies, we could start to hear interesting detail in the room…When we switched over it sounded like we switched over to expensive speakers, and got a lot more detail and a lot more of the characteristics that I’d normally associate with really good high-end speakers.”
In short, according to Murphy, the IsoAcoustics ISO-L8R155 offers a significant improvement in speaker performance that is worth an order of magnitude more than the retail price of the stands.
“It’s hard to imagine any other way that you could spend $100 and get such a significant change—and in this case an improvement—in your monitoring. It really did sound like we spent an additional $1,000 on our speakers.”
Summing up, Ronan says: “For the cost of about $100 a pair, this is a no-brainer. You should get a pair.”
