By Ralph Hodges
The Evolution of the Speaker Stand
IF memory serves, Acoustic Research offered the first speaker stands made by a speaker manufacturer, back in the late Fifties. Even AR's largest models were popularly referred to as "bookshelf' speakers, but many smallish book shelves didn't agree, and there were always those consumers who didn't have bookshelves at all. So AR put together an attractive little platform to get its speakers up off the floor, where much of their higher-frequency output might otherwise be swallowed by the carpet.
The Seventies ushered in a new form of speaker stand, which tilted the speaker back so it was partially aimed at the ceiling. This treatment amounted to a further restorative of reverberant high-frequency energy, and it also tended to align the acoustic centers of the drivers vertically, so that emissions from woofer and tweeter were likelier to reach the listener simultaneously. There is no evidence that the earliest designers of these stands had this specific result in mind, however. They did what they did because it sounded better, and that was that.
At some indefinable point during the current decade, the speaker stand evolved into a true audio component. In other words, minute details of its configuration, construction, materials, and finish be came critical audiophile concerns.
For instance, when Nakamichi briefly distributed a line of Mitsubishi monitor speakers in the U.S., users were directed to place them on a solid row of cinder blocks, even though they were more than large enough to qualify as floor-standers.
The late (and much lamented) Etsuro Nakamichi was adamant about it. Nothing, but nothing, would serve as a substitute for the cinder blocks, and to place the speakers naked on the floor was folly.
Today, the format of high-end speaker stands has become some what codified. The majority of them are stand-alone pillars, hollow so as to accept fillings of sand or lead shot. Their bases are spiked to penetrate carpeting and make intimate contact with the floor-if they're not designed to be screwed right into it-and their tops incorporate various means to hold the speaker snugly in place. The usual application for such a stand is to support one of the finely crafted two-way systems now so popular with high-end enthusiasts, and the cost of a pair of them can come close to doubling a loudspeaker expenditure.
What is the audio industry driving at anyway? I hate to use the phrase again, but the universal justification for these stands, from those who favor them, is that they "sound better." Is there any reason why they should? Well, after consultation with numerous high-end manufacturers (whom I will not quote directly, because their opinions are not yet fully formed), a hazy picture emerges.
For some years audiophiles have been discovering sonic advantages in positioning speakers away from room boundaries (walls, floors, ceilings). This makes good sense. Interfering reflections from these sur faces are diminished in strength and delayed in time the farther away they are. However, a speaker brought out toward the middle of a room is denied the anchor of a sturdy shelf, and it will tend to be rocked around by the activity of its drivers. (Testers of early acoustic-suspension systems were amused to find that, with heavy bass inputs, the speakers would "walk" across a room like a washing machine with an unbalanced load.) Does it matter if speakers shake themselves around a bit? Well, here's where some controversy arises. Informed opinion (but not for attribution) has it that the worst effect would be dopplering of the tweeter output. Bass wavelengths are long, and a tiny bit of shakiness at the source shouldn't mean much.
But the highest audio frequencies have wavelengths on the order of a half-inch or so, and spurious side-bands might conceivably be generated by a tweeter that doesn't stand still while it's working. One engineer even went so far as to say that concern about tweeter dopplering was probably responsible for some recent designs that put the tweeter at the bottom of the enclosure rather than the top. In a storm, the top of a ship's mast moves much more than the deck.
Considering all this, what you obviously want in a speaker stand is something extremely rigid, acoustically and physically inert (that probably translates to "heavy"), and I hate to use the phrase again, but the universal justification for high-end loudspeaker stands, from those who favor them, is that they "sound better." easy to vacuum under. Many of the new speaker stands clearly qualify.
There is the troubling matter that most enthusiasts of high-end speaker stands exult in improvements in the bass rather than the treble, suggesting that the tight coupling to the floor they provide is somehow beneficial. That could be, although few floors are properly designed as surrogate woofer cones. However, it is a common effect that once you get a sound system's treble cleaned up, the bass also seems to improve wondrously.
At the moment, this is about all that can be said about high-end speaker stands, except that they "sound better." And in many rooms, in my experience, they really seem to do the trick.
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