I made some stands for my Harbeth P3ESR’s. Right now, the only thing between speaker and stand are little square pieces of cork mat. And between stand and floor, I just have a rubber foot.
it sounds lovely, but I’m going to experiment a little bit. I know that the Tontraeger stands have an extended tenon, with a routed dimple they call a “tone bed”.
I could certainly create something like that on my stands. Or I could use some spikes between the speakers and the stands. And then spikes on the wood floor. I’m hesitant to put anything too crazy between the speaker and stand, though. The speakers look nice close to the stand, and I think spikes might just look too bizarre.
Anyway, just curious what you all have done for your smaller stand-mounted speakers, and what you’ve noticed.
Right now I use iso acoustics Apertas plus the 3M equivalent to BlueTac. I just wish my stands didn’t always feel so “tippy”. That’s my biggest fear with my hifi-losing a speaker in a stand tipover.
And spikes to floor. And lots and lots of lead in the stand. .20 ga from Cabela’s I think.
Cork bungs from amazon - big uns, twixt spkr and stand, those very hard rubbery trapezoidal self adhesive blocks twixt stand and floor.
Haven’t used the word twixt on the internet before
I have handbuilt oak platforms on wheels. The two sets of towers on each platform sit on four rubber (non-spiked) isolation feet; M6 threaded into the speaker base. The feet sit atop of cut strips of Herbie’s Audio Lab dampening sheets.
Nice looking stands. The best fix for the instability would be to add some mass to the bases. If there is a gun shop nearby you can buy a few bags of shot (lead if it is still available) and add them to the lower platform. Sandbags would probably work too. Not too elegant but it might lead to other similar solutions. Any fairly dense medium that you add will also tend to damp any natural freq. vibes but wood is not particularly prone to vibrate.
Yeah. The stands are already full of lead. When I feel better I plan to seal them using the fire block in a tube you can get at Lowe’s. But now that they’re full, and the screws are tight, there should be very little chance of lead exposure. Once I put in the fire block, that should go to about zero.
But the steel beads are a good idea to put on the bases. I’ll give that some thought.
@terzinator: Given your current set up, I really like brett66’s suggestion. Plasti-Tak (or Blu-tack) will couple the speaker to the stand (leave the cork pad in our out of the equation) a bit and likely prevent a mere bump and wobble leading to a tumble from the stands.
I have some small NHT speakers on stands for my rear channels when I run the rig in 7.1 mode. I have never knocked the stands over, but I have bumped them and sent the left rear speaker crashing to the ground on two occasions. That sticky stuff just might prevent a similar event in your case. (In my case, the NHT’s have a a couple of rubbery-tipped rails that run along the outside edge of their bottoms that didn’t quite do the trick.)
Certainly nothing to lose with such a modest investment while you ponder other potential approaches.
Starsound uses this configuration. These are under my subs. The Elac center channel in the rear uses a rubber interface between the speaker and the stand that matches the angled profile of the speaker, so I haven’t figured out a better way yet.
Hi all. Here is photo of my own design of speaker stands. Currently I am using Soundcare encapsulated spikes (3 per speaker) between speaker and top plate. Between stand and floor there are Isoacoustic Gaia II isolation feet (set of 4) mounted on steel bottom plate (4x stainless steel star knobs backnut for quick height adjustment). Before Isoacoustics I had Finite Elemente Ceraballs, but Isoacoustics Gaia II are far better im my setup.
Between each steel and wooden parts of the stand there are cork decoupling sheets.
Top plate is 8 mm steel plate, column is solid oak (glued wood), bottom is 12mm steel plate. All assembled via stainless steel hardware.
Overall weight of the single stand is 25 kg. Everything (except for hardware) was designed and hand made by me including all woodwork and surface finishing (steel plates manufactured on CNC machine).
