104 MACWORLD JANUARY 2022
PLAYLIST REVIEW: Q ACOUSTICS 3030iAll I Want plunked harshly, more like a
resonator-backed banjo. Vocals were
grainy, and Steely Dan guitar solos by Jeff
“Skunk” Baxter, Hugh McCracken, and
Larry Carlton were now painfully piercing,
shrieking, and tortuous.
Only after I performed a radical treble
downshift (-4 ticks) of the factory-tuned-
bright Sonos Amp’s EQ settings, a 1- or
2-dB treble reduction on the Bluesound
Powernode 2i, and enacted modest bass
boosts on both devices did the sound
become palatable in my listening room, a
13x20-foot sonic hothouse with
1850-vintage Southern pine floors, lots of
windows, and lath-and-plaster walls.
Pulling the speaker stands away from the
backing wall did no good. Switching
between high- and lower-resolution
streaming services made little difference.
Putting the supplied foam bungs into the
back ports of the speakers was no help,
either.
Finally, I had an aha moment: I laid
hands on the tubular metal stands and the
floor beneath while music played and felt
lots of sonic vibration being sucked out
of—and feeding back into—the speakers.
Clearly something was awry, Constable.
During the stand assembly, I kept in place
the little rubber boots that had arrived
already fitted over the screw-on spikes,
which were intended to isolate the stands
from my reverberant hardwood floor. But
close inspection now showed they weren’t.
After I’d turned the stands upright and
plopped ’em down,
those spikes had
silently bored through
these rubber
dampers to make
metal-on-wood
contact, which was all
wrong for this super
lively room. That
unsympathetic room
vibration (literally felt
in the floor and walls,
too) was now
wreaking havoc on
the musicality of the
speakers, introducingI purchased two sets of these carbon fiber discs to protect my
hardwood floors from the speaker stands’ spikes. They served the
double purpose of preventing vibrations from transferring to the floor.