DIY Speakerstand

[Joachim Gerhard]

Nearly each week i get a request from customers asking me about which speakerstand they should buy.
Usually i recomment Empire Stands.
The are made in Malaysia and are affordable and look quite good.
Most of the time time the next question is : What is the BEST sounding stand.
That is much harder to answer. Usually i recommend Solid Steel from Italy.
They are quite classy but also not cheap.
The same customers that bought speakers for 4000,-€ are quite shocked to learn that they cost 650,- € or more.
I think this can be a good investment because i know from experience that the mechanical support of the speaker makes a huge diffence for the sound but peope usually do not understand this.
i myself have made a lot of experiments over the years and i am now in a process to design some very special noise supression platforms for floorstanding speakers. they will be availlable under the Quantummusic label and again, not cheep.
Anyway this is not the toppic of this thread.
Getting tired of not beeing able to help my customers with an afordable and very good sounding solution i set out to design some stands that are dirt cheep and easy to make but perform substantially better then most offerings from the commercial market.
The idea came to me because i needed some stamds for myself in a certaim height that was not availlable and tracks back to my edjucation as a furniture designer.
i thoose days we sometimes build mokups from styrofoam to look at the proportion of our desigs without going to the pain of actually bulding a furniture from wood.
Styrofoam has many good properties that make it ideal for this project.
it is cheep and easyly awaillable, very lightweight so stores little energy. it is very easy to maschine even with a kitchen knife and it is very well damped.
ok it is not the most pretty of materials but it can be painted or covered with cloth. a much more nice looking material with even better properties is Rohacell. it is foamed acrylyc and unfortunately more expensive. for thoose who are prepared to spend more this is the way to go but actually i am trying to avoid cost in this project. anyway what i say here is also true for Rohacell so make your choise.
basically the stands are cut from one pillar that has the same width and depth then the bottom of the speakers. cut them to your prefered height with a handsaw or let a carpenter do that for you on a maschine for more acurate look. the best height is usually the one that puts the tweeter in ear height. atually i like the somewhat rough look of my handmade samples.
such a lightweight structure is of cause very easy to toss over so i finished the bottom with some heavy ceramic plates that where not expensive ether.
in fact you can find a lot of waist that is perfect for that porpose at places where the craftsmen work with stone. slate, granite, marble etc, whould do the job as well.
i glued the bottom stone plates to the styrofoam pillar with PE glue that is used for constuction. be carfull : some glues penetrate the Styrofoam cemically and you end up with a mess of meltet styrofoam.
having described the priciple i will send you some pictures and drawings of the finished pototype next time.

[Taco]

Novel idea, but I've one question: what is the long term stability of such foams? If I'm not mistaken these material are prone to creep under loading (the weight of the speaker on top).

[norman bates]

cinder blocks work well, you can caulk them and fill them with sand if you want (very, very heavy). Cost = almost nothing, cover with black fabric........

https://www.rainfordane.com/uploads/...blocks_005.jpg

Norman

[chris661]

I tend simply to use other speakers to stack them high enough.

Good idea though.

[doug20]

I use 4" PVC, route a hole a 10" round base piece of wood found also at HT. Fill 6" of the PVC with concrete for stability add a square piece of wood to the top of the PVC, then wrap with veneer.

[Joachim Gerhard]

styrofoam does not creep much
i have my stands working 6 weeks and there is no dimensional change
rohacell is of cause superb in that sense
for example B&W are using rohacell in their woofer cones by the way produced here in the town of Brilon where i live
this PVC pipe idea is great too but i was trying to do a low mass design at least in the pilar
stacking speakers on top of each other is the guerilla aproach.