The bearing pillow blocks are mounted on large rubber shock absorbers. I wrote to Matthew Higby to ask if they really reduced the clapper clunk without hurting the handling. He said yes, they did that, adding that Paul DeKok did the research and that Higby & Co upsized the gudgeons in case they wound up having more stress because of the movement. I have written to Paul for more information on the mounting. As I understand it, he also designed the frame, which has some other novel things going on.

This caught my attention because one of the problems at the Advent, as I understand it, is that some parishioners aren't keen on the bells because all they hear inside the church is "tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk tnk ..." and very little tone. 

The fix, of course, is much more complicated than "just" adding the isolators. The things take up a lot more space than the basic pillow blocks and there are a couple of places where the bearings of neighboring bells are too close together, so frame modifications (at the very least) would be required. 

Higby's are known for improving the tuning on pre-Simpson bells and adding trebles to match, and as a good businessperson, he put forward that Mears bells of that era tune up very nicely, The pie-in-the-sky project would be retuning, adding two trebles, and a new frame with isolators. The church would get better sound in the church and gentler movement of the tower without the hard whacks of the clappers. 

It's all rather unlikely and I am, of course, grateful for the opportunity to ring on the bells as they are, but this is the first time I have seen a possibility to address the complaint about the sound of the bells inside the church.