One solution to the problem of protecting floors or carpets when using speaker spikes has been to slip a copper coin underneath each spike. Although this distributes the weight over a wider area and prevents damage, it doesn’t do much to help deliver all of the sonic benefits spikes are designed to offer. Enter Blue Horizon’s Spike Shoes MkII – claimed to provide the benefits of controlling resonances. The maker explains that rival devices focus on protecting surfaces without considering their sonic effect, making them little better than using the aforementioned coin.
Chain reaction
As well as protecting the floor or equipment rack, the shoes are intended to enhance sound quality by suppressing resonances that can result in sonically damaging microphony, which is then fed back to the equipment and can find its way into the audio chain. This resonance suppression is achieved by filling the machined stainless-steel outer casing with what the manufacturer describes as a “chaotic cork and rubber mix”. This proprietary combination of materials has differing elasticities and frequencies claimed to cancel out resonances equally across the audio band. Measuring 38mm in diameter and at 7.5mm thick (6.5mm at the centre-point), the shoes allow for spike loading of up to 100kg. Positioning them underneath the cones fi tted to my 300B valve monoblocks, I play Laurent Garnier’s Tales Of A Kleptomaniac. The track has a big, thumping bass line running throughout, and with the shoes installed the lower frequencies suddenly come across as tighter and better controlled. Although certainly not the most affordable spike shoes currently available, Blue Horizon’s MkII solution offers an effective means of protecting equipment racks and floors, while the resonance controlling construction delivers impressive sonic rewards too.
Source: HiFi Choice Review
