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Now what?  I have my setup finalized for now.  The gear is in place and the system is working properly and sounds pretty good.  Budget is at $0.  Ideal time to upgrade!  With no budget, that means I can’t spend too much money.  Within that restriction, I find freedom.

So, what DO I have to work with?  At the moment, not much really.  No lingering gear worth swapping around or speakers to build.  All I have on hand is about 10 square feet of MDF (medium density fiberboard).  It’s commonly used for its decent sonic attributes in speaker building, in speaker stand and equipment rack construction.  So what could different stands do for the sound of my system?  I decided it would be a good challenge, for its interesting criteria.  It appeared this upgrade might provide the biggest return for my nonexistent dollar.

Let’s look at what makes a speaker stand a speaker stand.  Speaker stands, like speakers, need to look good, or at least not look bad.  They need to support their load.  And also like speakers, they need to sound good.   I thought I might be up to the challenge-- the stands I would be replacing didn’t exactly have a lot going for them.  I had been using hollow plaster pillar-shaped decorative stands, probably intended for some knick-knacky décor use.  They wouldn’t be missed much, as the Mediterranean carved look didn’t really go with the room, let alone the rest of the house.  And being hollow and brittle, I couldn’t expect them to exhibit much in the way of controlling resonance.  They sound like bells when rapped with your knuckle.  I can build something that is better looking and sounding, I told myself.

There are different approaches to stand design to consider, all of which have to deal with controlling resonance.  One approach is centered around reducing vibrations, called damping  (Often mistakenly called dampening... I always wonder how wetter is better). This theory is based on the fact that transducers create sound by vibrating, and therefore accuracy in reproduction will be improved if the vibration of all other structures can be reduced.  This usually relies on sheer mass to make a structure more difficult to vibrate, or isolation of resonating mass through assembly techniques that permit decoupling of joined parts, or a combination of both.  Think of this as attempting to stop unwanted vibrations before they start.  I will call this theory ‘inert’.

A second approach, which I will refer to as ‘active,’ attempts to stop the negative effects of resonation by draining them away, quickly, before they might linger long enough to color the output of the speaker.  This approach recognizes the fact that every thing in the universe, especially a thing in direct contact with a loudspeaker, does indeed resonate, and focuses its design on giving resonance somewhere to go, so they may stop quickly.  Lightweight materials and careful measurement and tuning attempts to create a structure that cannot sustain vibration once input has stopped.  When properly used, the cones and discs often seen supporting large loudspeakers (and other gear as well) implement this theory. Think of a string that is only attached at one end.  That would make a lousy guitar, but a great speaker stand, if speakers could float.  But I guess then you wouldn’t need a stand.

Then there’s the issue of reflections.  It’s entirely possible for flat surfaces on a stand to reflect sound, which can adversely affect tonal balance and cause loss of detail.

Obviously I don’t have expensive equipment to measure and tune with, or high-tech materials to employ.  All I have are some MDF, glue, screws, some geometry, and my own interpretations of how designs have been executed.  And since filling my speakers with helium failed at making them float, it’s apparent I need to glue and screw some stands together.

I’ve been building speaker enclosures using MDF, mostly for subwoofers, for about 15 years.  It can be quite cumbersome.  For this project, aesthetically, I want to achieve something more elegant, matching the understated, disappearing nature of the B&Ws.  I began imagining a slender, lightweight design using arcs as a theme, and curves complementing the shape of the speakers.  This design would rely on MDF’s internal damping characteristics to accentuate resonance, and rely on the shape and orientation of the panels to (hopefully) minimize the effects of such resonance, as well as keep the frontal area quite small to reduce any reflections.  It appears my stand project will be an attempt closer to the Active method than the Inert.

My challenge now seems to be to build a stand that is highly likely to resonate in a predictable way.  Without access to an accelerometer, all I can really do is attempt to predict likelihood.  The only measurement tool I have is my ears, and I won’t be able to use them until the project is finished.

In my next column I will describe how I try to achieve all of this with six small pieces of MDF, and let you know what my ears have measured.