Speaker Asylum General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

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Yes, polyester batting!!!

Posted by David Aiken (A) on May 23, 2003 at 14:40:43

In Reply to: Polyester batting? posted by DD on May 23, 2003 at 06:04:00:

If you compress the polyester tightly within the column, it does damp vibration in the column walls slightly plus it kills internal reverberation within the column.

I found that with a Lovan classic rack and Lovan speaker stands, I much preferred the sound with polyester doing the damping than with sand or lead. Polyester is much lighter and that's the point. A large part of the gain in bass weight that sand and lead provide is due to the fact that the added mass lowers the resonant frequency of the rack or stand, and puts it into the mid to upper bass region where the resonance adds to the sound. It also induces a steeper bass rolloff below resonance. You end up gaining weight and slam which people immediately respond to, but only from the mid bass up, and you end up losing some extreme bass extension with the steeper rolloff.

The tonal character of the bass changes too. Depending on the type of music you play, that may or may not be an issue. If you like music where the acoustic double bass is used, the extra mass of sand or lead will harden the tone of the instrument and you will have less sense of the string and wood characteristics of the double bass. Overall I find the sound of double bass shifts a bit in the direction of an electric bass sound when mass is added.

You may like the sound of mass - sound preferences are personal and what suits one person won't suit another - but my feeling on the tradeoffs with adding mass are:

- if you listen to a lot of music with acoustic bass (jazz, classical, folk etc), don't add mass because you'll lose tonal colour;

- if you listen to a lot of music with very deep synthesiser bass and don't have a sub, don't add mass because you'll lose the extreme extension (it's unlikely most people with stand mounted speakers will listen to much of this sort of music without a sub);

- if you listen to pop/rock with little acoustic bass or synth bass, then adding mass may work for you, and it may if you listen to deep synth type music with a sub. Even so, my preference is still for avoiding mass loading these days when I can.

I've tried both and when I converted from mass loading to using polyester for damping, I removed close to 70 lb weight of lead shot from my rack and stands. I'm convinced it was one of the best moves I've ever made. The gains in tonality and extension are more than worth the loss of weight and tonal colour in the bass.

David Aiken

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