View Single Post
Old 05-02-2007, 12:04 PM   #24
scottdru
Human being with feelings
 
scottdru's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2007
Posts: 1,312
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bubbagump View Post
There is a new idea for me. I have known to get dense speaker stands, but to use cinder blocks is a great idea (and really obvious when you think about it).
Cheap, too!

Quote:
I just gotta figure out how to pretty em up though.
I usually tell people they can just drape them in any kind of nice fabric that suits their decor. You can also paint them, but I'd think that draping them with fabric would be a more elegant solution.

Hehe . . . I recommended the cinder block option to somebody in a thread at gearslutz one time, and within about 8 or 12 hours of the time I had posted the suggestion (the guy was located in China, I believe), the guy had run out and bought some cinder blocks and sawed them all in half (to stack up the halves for 2 stands) . . . the dude sawed them with a HAND SAW, FFS!!! LOL. I was stunned!

Quote:
<slight hijack> What is your opinion of something like the Auralex MoPADs alone on a desktop or in conjunction with a proper dense speaker stand?

</end hijack>
For some situations, they may offer some improvements, but IMHO they are really not an ideal solution, because I feel they could still allow for a certain amount of (very miniscule) movement of the speaker that could give you some time smearing. But if you need them to isolate the speaker a bit from a desktop that is resonating like hell, and you need to get them up a little bit off the surface of the desk, or to angle the monitors down at you so that you'll be getting a little more "correct" angle of incidence from the tweaters to your ear, then I'd say they can certainly help a bit with these things if you don't have any other options . . . but there may be better solutions.

For example, it might be better to use a couple of concrete or marble, stone (or other heavy, dense material) slabs underneath the monitors than to use foam. But then again, it depends on how much of your problem is, for example, the result of an extremely resonant (and perhaps a bit wobbly) desk . . . you may need a greater thickness of concrete/stone, etc. than you want to risk stacking on that desk to get the isolation you need! Lead is another material that could work for that kind of isolation, but that can have its own drawbacks too (for the obvious reasons).

I think in the vast majority of cases you are best getting the monitors up on separate, heavy stands, rather than setting them on your desktop or a platform attached to a desk. If you have the monitors on separate, heavy stands, the MoPads aren't likely to offer any particular benefit (other than perhaps to angle the monitors down if that's needed, but in that case you are better to either build the stands to an appropriate height and/or make adjustments to your seating height, or use something else that's dense and heavy to introduce the angle).
scottdru is offline   Reply With Quote