If you’re not familiar with IsoAcoustics, it’s a company that specializes in products for decoupling speakers, amps and studio monitors from the surfaces on which they’re placed. One of its latest products is the New Stage 1 Board. It’s a 25 x 10 x 1.85-inch polymer board with attached isolating feet reminiscent of the company’s ISO-Puck products, and it’s designed to be used with guitar, bass and keyboard amplifiers, stage monitors, and speaker cabinets.
The board can handle weights of up to 100 pounds. Having the integrated isolators is the primary difference between the New Stage 1 Board and its predecessor, the Stage 1 Board. For the latter, the isolators were not attached to the board and had to be purchased separately.
According to the company, placing the New Stage 1 Board between a speaker cabinet or amp and the floor or stage will result in improved sound quality and low-end punch. The idea behind it is to isolate the speaker cabinet from its supporting surface and absorb its vibrations, thus reducing the chance they will “excite” that surface and create dissonant resonance.
Read more Product of the Week: Lectrosonics DPR.
Cabinet vibrations can also excite other objects in the same room. They can resonate through floors, thus increasing how much sound bleeds into neighboring rooms, and cause reflections that bounce back at the speaker and smear its image.
In the studio, the New Stage 1 Board is perfect for separating amps and cabinets from the floor. It’s light and easy to move around, so it can be easily repositioned for different setups.
For live performance situations (which hopefully will resume in the near future), the New Stage 1 Board is useful for isolating amps and cabinets from stages, thus making their sound more consistent from venue to venue.
