kling@ICS.UCI.EDU (Rob Kling) (08/21/90)
Hi .... I'm looking for high quality 8" speaker stands for a specific speaker (9x12" surface). I have been listening to a pair of Monitor Audio RS952 "floor standing" speakers for about 18 months. I generally like their open sound .... They are 32" high, and their top is just below ear height when I sit in a chair. John Atkinson reviewed them in Stereophile in this "floor standing" position 2-3 yrs ago & so did I when I bought them. Quite by accident a few months ago I found that they are much more coherent & balanced ... etc. when I sit on the floor, because my ears are then lined up with the tweeters which are 23" off the floor (midway between dual woofers). In one sense this comes as no surprise.... tweeter at ear level is the Normal way to listen carefully to music ... what does surprise is that Monitor Audio markets these fine sounding speakers as floor standing. I've called Monitor Audio & talked w/my dealer about 6-8" stands for them. The head guy at MA was aware of the issue but did not know what product to recommend. (My dealer was just surprised....). Sound Anchors doesn't make a specific stand for the MA952 ... & the local selection of stands seem to start at about 12". These are narrow tall speakers & I want to get them to the "right height." So I don't want too tall a stand or a solution that's unstable & tippable.. Has anyone dealt with this problem? Thanks Rob Kling UC-Irvine
drm2@mvuxn.att.com (David R Moran) (08/23/90)
Stands are in general the worst thing possible to do with a pair of speakers, because almost invariably they put a broad notch in the 100-400 Hz range due to the floor-bounce cancelation. This is the voice range, on both sides of middle C. The sound often "opens up" and people like it and mistake it for accurate reproduction. It is perhaps the most common error regarding speaker placement. The notch is commonly called the Allison effect after its chief "documenter" (who designs around it with extreme cleverness in his own speakers; I have no connection to that company). The only way around this is to be sure that the newly "standed" distance from woofer center to floor is _maximally_ different from its two distances to front wall and side wall for each speaker cabinet. In other words, if the woofer on its new stand is 22" up, ensure that it is nowhere near 22" from the side and front wall. The geometric-mean way to reckon "maximal difference" is with C-squared = AB for the three distances involved, with A,B,C not equal of course. Doing this will let you use stands and still not have bad Allison-effect ripple in that crucial reproduction sonic area. Otherwise leave them on the floor and tilt them backward a bit to aim the tweeter more toward your ears. The "least-cubes" geometric- mean rule still applies, however; it's just easier to achieve with the woofer center only a foot or less from the floor.... JG Holt in Stereophile reviewed an Allison speaker a few years ago and initially found its accurate "fullness (richness)" in this range to be awfully weird and almost puzzlingly objectionable; after a while he concluded (and wrote) that this was correct and all other speakers incorrect in this regard. Not that Spile has gone on to recommend Allisons ever, for some reason....
kling@ICS.UCI.EDU (Rob Kling) (08/24/90)
David, Thanks for your note ..... in brief, I found your suggestion to tilt the speakers helpful (& cheap!). I have placed some thick books about regression analysis under the front edge .... to see how the sound changes.. On a quick listen, it helps alot .... Oddly, I had never considered this kind of solution. Partly because I've never tilted high end speakers back ... and further because these are spiked into the carpet & I didn't want to sacrifice the coupling ..... (Re distances, I only need to raise them 6-8", and they're 20" from one wall & 72" from a back wall in an L shaped room with a high cathedral ceiling ....)..... I knew that Allison designed speakers that would take room boundaries into account, especially for near wall or corner placement ... The speaker I owned before this Monitor Audio 952 was a Snell 1, a solidly constructed floor standing speaker that had a special design with the tweeter & woofer at the floor with a special ramp to provide a known boundary for the sound field to reflect from ..... This speaker sounded quite fine circa 1980 when I bought a pair, but were relatively muffled and bass heavy compared with the Monitor Audios ..... whihc are extremely transparent and musical, although a bit light in the bass .... - - -------------------- Anyway, thanks for your advice about tilting. If this works, it will be an inexpensive and visually less troublesome fix. Rob Kling