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The speaker stands I have for my VMPS 626R's are a bit too high, and since Brian recommends bearded stands, I thought that DIY might be better than a commercial offering.I have thought about building a solid MDF stand by either stacking MDF cut to the speaker dimensions either vertically or horizontally. Would it be better to make a hollow box and fill it with sand or concrete, or would the stacked MDF be a good solution? I thought I'd spike the stand with some big spikes from Parts Express, three per stand, so I can level the stand.
Follow Ups:
It sounds like a lot of people recommend sand filled stands. I think I'm going to build a box out of MDF, brace it with holes drilled into the braces, then fill it with sand. I only need about an 18" high box, so it can all be done with one sheet of MDF.I am thinking about fitting the top plate of the stand inside the opening in the box, so that the speaker would "float" on the sand. Is this a stupid idea? It would make the whole thing more difficult, and it might not even be good.
. . . it's going to settle.
It may or may not be good. It's easy to test, however because one could try 'floating' the speaker on top of the sand and also on top of a solid plate closing the top of the stand and see which you prefer. Use something like double sided tap to secure the plate across the top of the stand for that part of the test in order to prevent it from moving. That probably won't be as good as gluing/screwing the plate down but it will be good enough to give you an idea of what that option sounds like.Warning: for the 'floating on sand' option, and for the other option as well, you don't want the width and depth dimensions of the stand to exceed the width and depth dimensions of the speaker. That would introduce a lip around the edge of the speaker at stand height and that won't be good. What this means is that the internal dimensions of the opening at the top of the stand are going to be smaller than the speaker's width and depth so it won't fit inside the stand to sit on the stand. You are going to have to use a top plate on top of the sand and sit the speaker on top of that top plate. The top surface of the top plate will have to protrude slightly above the height of the top edges of the sides of the stand so that the speaker is resting on the top plate which in turn rests on the sand. If you don't do that, the speaker will sit on the top edges of the stand sides which won't give the sand based support you're trying to achieve.
It took several days for the (very dry) sand to settle and some top-ups and fiddling.With a bit of patience I got the top plate to have a 3mm gap all round and it hasn't moved in 12 months since then.
Very subjective but i can't "feel" my floor doing anything - even with Mahler or swept tones.
.
Why would you need to have air flow underneath the speaker? Many people recommend blu tak to secure a speaker to a stand, and that doesn't allow for much air in between the stand and the speaker.Just curious as to why you would make that recommendation.
If the speakers are floorstanders?
Hi.Please stick to the topic.
Any loudspeaker system designed to perform OFF the floor need its base stand free air flowing as if it was still off the floor.
This is how such off-floor speakers are designed, built & tested in the anechoic chamber. To allow the loudspeaker to work at home to reproduce close to such ideal non-reflective envirnonment it is designed, care must be taken to allow free air flow from all direction, that includes the base stand.
Ideally, the loudspeaker should be lifted in the air off the floor.
But realistically it cannot be done. So a acoustically transparent base stand should be used as much as possible to provide free air flowing under the loudspeaker box.That's why any box shaped base stand is not recommended. FYI, my bookshelf loudspeaker are placed on strong tripod-shaped steel
stand on strong steel spikes, with the voids inside the tubular legs jam-packed with lead shots & sands. Very fine sands are there to fill up the voids in btween the lead shots to prevent lead shots from moving inside the stand legs.The stands are pretty much acoustically transparent, & pretty immune to acoustical feedback & structural vibration from the floor below due to its added mass & isolation via the steel leg spikes.
More on floor standing loudspeakers later.
If we go back to the original post, it started out as follows: "The speaker stands I have for my VMPS 626R's are a bit too high, and since Brian recommends bearded stands".What that means is that the speaker manufacturer, Brian Cheney, recommends stands with a beard or front plate for his speakers. In those circumstances, I would expect that Brian designs and tests them with stands that do have a beard or front plate.
Your assumption about non-solid sides to stands is probably correct in the majority of cases. It's definitely not totally correct here. I have no idea whether the stands Brian Cheney uses have sides and a back as well as the front plate but one could always ask Brian and attempt to duplicate whatever he uses.
Unfortunately there are no hard and fast rules about whether stands should have solid or open sides, be mass loaded or not, place the tweeter at ear height or higher/lower that will apply to all speakers. It would be very nice if they were but manufacturers have as much variation in those parameters when they design and test stand mount speakers as they do with any other paramater such as sealed box or ported, panel or dynamic, ribbon or dome tweeter, etc. We can find examples of speakers designed to be used with every variation of stand design available if we look hard enough.
Hi.No musician wants to play the instrument inside a confined cubicle.
Why? Sound waves produced by the instrument, a violin or piano alike, got to radiate freely all over the place.Reverse if also true: a loudspeaker is designed to reproduce the music produced by the musical instrument, & should be positioned in a way to allow sound waves radiated as unobstructed as possible.
Hence we have seen some hi-end speaker makers, like B&W, who have been building loudspeakers for decades with their flagship models all spherical shaped - to minimize unwanted deflection of the sound waves beaming out of the speaker box.
Speaker stand services at lease two purposes, IMO:-
(1) lift the speaker off the floor in minimize sound waves reflection immediately backup from the floor. Such deflection & reflection can ruin the loudspeakers' original designed frequency response, e.g. bass response. Hence we often find loudspeakers reproduce kinda better bass when placed directly on the floor.
Same idea applies when speakers are placed against the wall. The wall reflection changes the loudspeaker frequency response audibly.
(2) level up the tweeter of the loudspeaker which reproduces the high frequencies of the music signals, most directional to our aural perception, to our ear level to deliver the accurate soundstaging images.
Therefore the best way to position the loudspeakers should be, IMO, off the wall & off the floor (with an open-up base stand to set for our ears level) so that the orginal music reproduced would be not be distorted due to unwanted deflection & reflection.
My bookself speakers are placed 2.5 meters from the back wall & miniumn one metre from the side wall, on strong & massive steel tripod-shaped 20" off the floor. The idea is to minimize the unwanted side/back wall & floor reflection to ruin the response of the loudspeakers. Hence good sound.
One thing very crucial is: there is NOTHING repeat, nothing should be placed in between the two stereo loudspeakers.
Many like to place their audio racks in between the loudspeaker which obstruct the sound waves despersion big bigtime.
I bet you if you take out the loudspeakers away from all these in between sound reflective & deflective obstructions, the music will sound so much better, livelier & soundstage imaging more realistic.
This is exactly what I am doing now.Same physics applies to floor standing speakers. Unless the loudspeakers are specifically designed with the box seated on the floor, I would lift them at least a few inches off the floor on brick or wooden footings so that there is free air flow through.
Such lifting off the floor also serves the purpose of eliminating floor vibration resonances backup to the loudspeaker.c-J
I used to be an amateur musician 40 years ago and I used to play in public. At one stage I was accomapanist for a singer at a local folk club and we used to see each other once a week at the club. Rehearsals were brief and the best, ie most out of the way, place for us to go to work out a new song or two and discuss what she wanted to sing was in the fire escape stair well. Exactly the sort of 'confined cubicle' you say that no musician wants to play within. The acoustics were wonderful in many ways, apart from an overly long reverb time. Lots of support for her voice and my guitar. Better than the acoustics on stage and in the club in some ways. Even that long reverb time could be made to work for you if you chose the right music for it and utilised the reverb as part of the sound you wanted to generate. What worked in the stair well, if you did that, certainly wouldn't work anywhere near as well on stage in the club's quite different acoustics. Of course, those acoustics were unique to that particular stair well and the other stair wells I've been in never sound as good as that particular stair well did.Some music actually sounds better in smaller spaces and smaller spaces are confined by definition. Classical chamber music tends to be performed in concert halls because that's what you need to fit the audience in, but it was written and intended for performance in much smaller rooms. It sounds better in a living room than in a concert hall to my ears, and I've heard it played in both. A solo acoustic guitar sounds wonderful from several feet away in a living room and nowhere near as good in a hall, even a small hall.
Musical instruments don't radiate uniformly in all directions. Trumpets and trombones, for examples, are horns and actually radiate in a similar manner to a horn loaded speaker. Pianos and acoustic guitars have soundboards which are dipole radiators. Guitars and many stringed instruments also have cavities behind that soundboard and a soundhole in the soundboard so there is another radiation pattern from the soundboard's backwave and a lot of diffraction as that backwave exits the soundhole. All instruments are directional to some degree and different instrument families have different radiation patterns.
Speakers don't have to duplicate the radiation pattern of the instruments they are reproducing. They simply have to deliver as close as possible to what was recorded, which is only what the instrument sounded like at the microphone location, to the listener at their chair. The instrument's radiation pattern is irrelevant. If what was recorded was the sound the instrument actually produced at the point where it created the sound, having a speaker with the same radiation pattern as the instrument would make sense because, wherever you sat in relation to the speaker, you would then hear the sound you would have heard had you sat in the same relationship to the instrument AND the instrument was being played in the room in which you were listening to the recording. The sound that is recorded, however, is not the sound at the point of production. It's the sound at some other point some distance away and that sound represents only one aspect of the instrument's sound in the original space. You can't generate all of the other aspects of the instrument's sound that you could have heard at other points in the original space from the one sample you have. And having the sound that was picked up by the mic then radiated in the same way as the instrument's sound radiates from the instrument is a major disruption of what the instrument's radiation pattern at the microphone location was.
Some of these things sound nice in theory. Sure, instruments do radiate in all directions but they don't radiate evenly in all directions and all instruments don't radiate in the same way. At the microphone location the sound isn't radiating in every direction, it's radiating in a straight line defined by the line connecting the acoustic centre of the instrument and the microphone's location. It's actually impossible for any recording and speaker combination to reproduce the sound and radiation pattern of an acoustic instrument at the point where it produces it's sound and, if it were possible, you would need a separate speaker for each performer, placed in the same pattern (including duplicating instrument and/or voice height) as the performers during their performance, in order to duplicate the soundfield produced by them when the recording was made. We don't have recordings made that way, or systems which we can set up with 1 channel and speaker per performer.
I repeat: there are no iron clad rules that will work for all speakers and rooms, and what one person likes with one speaker another person will be sure to hate. The best 'rules' are very good places to start but you need to accept that your preference may be for something slightly different, the speaker slightly higher or lower than placing the tweeter at ear height (I like mine Contour 1.3 SEs placed with ear height about midway between the tweeter and the mid-woofer), solid or open stands etc.
What matters is that the end result is convincing to you. It can't and won't sound exactly like the real thing and it doesn't have to make you think that it is real. It merely has to lure you into suspending your doubts and responding to the music as if it were a real performance.
Hi.(1) No musician wants to play inside a confined cubicle, or even
in a much less confined area, like stair well. It changes the acoustics of the instruments as heard by the players & the listeners alike. Surely you can rehearse everywhere you want, even in a toilet cubicle. Who cares? But for performances, no way, Jose.Chamber music should be played in a music chameber rather than in symphony concert hall. What is that to do with "playing in a confined cubicle" ???? Moot argument.
(2) I never said musical instruments radiate "UNIFORMLY", only you assumed I said so. Every instrument got its characterstic sound waves
dispersion patterns. Even a honky tonk sounds unlike a classical piano. Moot argument.(3) I never said speaker needs to replicate the dispersion patterns of any musical instrument. Your assumption is wrong again.
Any loudspeaker can NEVER replicate the sound patterns of an instrument. Period.Loudspeaker is a electrical-acoustical converter man-made to restore the sound picked up by the recording microphones which is a acoustical-electrical converter. A better designed loudspeaker may be able to do better in its sole function of electrical-acoustical conversion. This is a complex chain action from the pick up microphones to the loudspeakers, electrically alone.
A musical performance is a concerted acoustical radiation pattern to the listener's ears at that particualar position. Some people like to listen on the balcony. But I defintely want my seat be 13th row centre for a symphony concert hall where I believe it gives me the best overall balance of the musical performance+hall acoustics.
As a performance listener, I want to enjoy it in a distance to receive the total sonic perspectives there rather than do so on the stage in the close proximity of the performers & the musical instruments.
Any recordings made from the live performance in a concert hall or in a recording studio alike is s very compromise reproduction of the live event. That's why recorded music reproduction, no matter how good it could be, is only a lesser alternative to the live event.
It is therefore the job of the recording team to make it happen as close as possible to the live events. That's why we find recordings of the same title sound so different from one another due to so many factors involved. Some we find are "good" recordings & some are "bad".
It's therefore our job too, as the listener at home, to make sure the loudspeakers can perform properly by proper positioning with minimum radiation obstruction.
Bad positioning of a loudspeaker, as I already posted yesterday, can only do damage than cure. It is not solely a matter of personal preference as to how one would like to play with its toys.
Enjoying reproduced music at home can be a joy if done properly. Using live events as the yardstick is better than do it whatever way one prefers. Some good reference is far better than no reference.
Right?c-J
PS: My elder son is a 24-year veteran (hobby) classical pianist.
I listen to live piano most probably more than many readers here.
OK, I misinterpreted your statements on a couple of points.Re your response:
"But I defintely want my seat be 13th row centre for a symphony concert hall where I believe it gives me the best overall balance of the musical performance+hall acoustics."
Really? 13th row centre in every symphony concert hall, regardless of the fact that they all have differences in sizes, different proportions, and different acoustics?
I'd believe you if you said you like to listen in the far field where the reflected sound field makes a strong contribution to the overall mix.
I don't know where "13th row" is in your favourite hall. I prefer to sit around a third of the way back in the seating area of the hall for some halls and some music, but I do go for closer or for further away in some cases.
"Using live events as the yardstick is better than do it whatever way one prefers. Some good reference is far better than no reference. "
I agree, provided we're talking acoustic music performed without microphones in a hall with reasonable acoustics as the yardstick events. I have heard live performances that sounded abysmal and where I would prefer a live recording, had one been made at the eventt, to sound quite a deal different to the real thing. On the other hand not everyone will agree with that premise, either in the way you stated it or in my modified version of it, and those people who don't agree with it are quite justified in pursuing whatever sonic goal they prefer when listening to recordings. The purpose of listening to music is enjoyment and doing so in a way which brings you enjoyment actually makes sense. Why listen to music at home if the way it sounds does not give you joy? I'd rather see someone listening to and enjoying music at home on a system delivering sound that I regarded as unnatural and unnaceptable than see them not listening to the same music because they don't like the way it sounds on the sort of system and setup that you or I prefer. If you want to transfer the view I'm presenting here to literature, I'd rather see someone reading, even if they read pulp fiction I would never be seen dead reading and never read anything I regard as worthwhile, than see them not reading at all because their alternative to not reading was reading my reading choices and they have no interest in my choices.
Having said all that, I also regard live performance and recorded performances as different art forms. What works in one sometimes doesn't work in the other. One also listens very often to some recorded performances, something that is impossible with a live performance, and that changes how and what one listens to and for in the performance, especially as one becomes more familiar with a particular recording. I don't listen to recordings in the same way that I listen at a live performance. I also like to find new things in a recorded performance when I listen to it again and again. I don't want the same experience every time—that becomes boring and then I stop listening to and enjoying that recording. I feel I've "played it out". I personally find a lot of difference between listening to a live performance and listening to a recording and I find nothing wrong in having a system and listening setup at home that presents some things differently to the way I like things presented when I attend a live performance.
I'm prepared to bet that we don't listen to and for the same things in music, even when we're listening to the same music. With classical music I tend to prefer small group works rather than symphonic works these days, and I also like to be able to follow the contribution made by individual performers and/or individual intstruments. Those aspects are also important to me with jazz, which is my main interest these days, and similar preferences apply there. My preferred listening setup for recordings is a near field setup which gives a much closer perspective than I prefer in most live venues I've been in over recent years. That is a personal preference. Others may try to recapture as much of their live performance experience as possible when they listen to recordings. That's their preference. Nothing wrong with that, we don't all have to have the same preferences, but there's no reason to believe that our personal preferences represent the best solution for everyone.
I wholeheartedly agree that one should try to avoid unwanted reflections with the listening room setup but not all reflections are unwanted or avoidable. In the matter of open stands vs stands with a beard, the reflections introduced by the beard can have benefits with SOME speakers, and there are some speakers where the designer actually recommends such a stand, as is apparently the case with the VMPS speakers which prompted the question that started this thread. Restricting their radiation with a beard is apparently the way those speakers are intended to be heard. Some people may have a preference for a stand with a beard for some other speakers. The beard can provide some support at lower frequencies and some listeners may find that benefit outweighs any disadvantages introduced by the beard. The reason for that may be that they find their speakers slightly deficient in the lower frequencies (that may be a speaker problem or a room problem) or it may be a 'sonic taste' preference and they can't find or afford a speaker that gives them quite what they want and the stand with a beard is the best compromise in the situation.
Just because someone does something differently to the way you or I think it should be done doesn't mean that they're indulging a "personal preference as to how they would like to play with their toys". It could well be a considered decision that represents what they regard as the best compromise for them in the situation. To represent all deviations from one way of doing things, whatever the reasons supporting doing it that one way, as degrading the standard of result achievable tends to imply that the deviation stems from ignorance and that if the person making it knew and understood the principles involved in getting good sound they would do it differently. That most definitely is not the case. Many people can and do deviate from the way you or I do things in full knowledge of the principles involved, and they are making a conscious decision to pursue a different sonic goal than you or I. They're making a very informed decision. We may not agree with it, and we don't have to agree with it, but however we want to regard it we should not regard such choices as merely pointless and destructive games being played with toys.
David Aiken
PS: my wife was a pianist and we lived with a piano in the home for 27 years until I sold it after her death. I'm also familiar with the sound of a live piano though I don't hear that sound anywhere near as often these days as I used to. I started playing acoustic and classical guitar over 40 years ago and while I no longer play myself, I still listen to live music which is something I have enjoyed since before I started learning to play an instrument myself.
Hi.It seems to be we are talking 'eye-to-eye'.
Yes, I am a man sticking to routines. Everyday's routines is my bread-&-butter businesses, household works to help out my wife, DIY bench works & Hifi listening if time permits. Likewise, my choice of seat in a concert hall.
Of course, for small chamber musics, I would prefer to be 4th row centre.
I agree with you 100% - use live acoustical performance as the yardstick for any HiFi. But the facts of life is there is seldom any more pure acoustic performances available. Most most of them are now PA enforced. That is the very reason why I choose to sit closer to the stage of a concert so that the masking effect of the PA can be minimized.
That said, live acoustical performance do exist - handily at no cost!
Where? Sunday morning church service. There we can enjoy vocal choirs
with or without piano & live instrument accompanyment.I am not religious despite my wife, & my two sons are. I only knew this when I attended my son's piano tutor's weddng in a small chapel many years back. There was a 8 member small choir delivering what I called it music from the heaven above. So real, so live & yet so tranquil. Only a piano, no PA.
Every boils down to its phyics. If an loudspeaker manufacturer specifies something not in line of the acoutic basic phyiscs. Why not try a different way & listen and/or measure the difference. See which way could be better.
When a blockade stand is recommanded for a loudspeaker, to me it is somewhat not in line of physics. Either the design needed a blockade stand to flatten up its frequency response, or for whatever reasons.
But as your said, room acoustics can have a better say than manufacturer's specification. Why not try it out & compare?When I found my KEF 2-way bookshelf loudspeakers did not sound right - ringing like hell due to its metallic dome tweeter (despite it was used to build BBC monitors). I replaced its tweeter with a Norway SEAS 1.5" soft fabric dome tweeter. I also rebuit its mikey mouse type X-over network to a discrete bi-wired network with large PP film capacitors.
It sounds so much better like a wholly resurrection. You believe every word the manufacfurer tells you? I don't until I test it.
c-J
PS: sorry to know you miss your wife's piano playing.
"When a blockade stand is recommanded for a loudspeaker, to me it is somewhat not in line of physics. Either the design needed a blockade stand to flatten up its frequency response, or for whatever reasons."Well, designers do at times design speakers specifically for placement close to walls. Rooms in the UK are often smaller than in the US or here in Australia and some English speakers have been designed for placement against a wall simply to make it easier for people to use them in small rooms. A lot of the BBC studio designs are designed to work very well close to or against walls simply because studio space can be extremely limited, especially a mobile studio, and on occasion can make a small room seem like ample space by comparison. Roy Allison designed a range of speakers years ago that were designed to be placed against walls in order to work with, rather than against boundary effects. And, of course, Paul Klipsch designed the classic Klipschorn for corner placement so that the walls effectively expanded the size of the horn mouth.
I think a good speaker is one that's designed to work well in the sort of placement for which it is designed and I'd actually like to see a little more work done on designing speakers for use closer to, against, or even in walls.
One good thing about the expanding home theatre market is that we are now starting to see more attention being given to such speakers. If it's sometimes hard to place 2 speakers far enough out into the room in order to get them performing at their best, it's considerably harder, probably a fair bit more than twice as hard, to get 5 speakers far enough away from the walls to sound their best while still keeping them all far enough away from the listening position to allow proper driver integration and to also allow seating for quite a few more people than often want to listen to music. You really start to need a quite large room to accommodate a 5.1 surround system with speakers placed well away from walls and it gets worse again as you move up to 6.1 and 7.1 systems. Just to throw an element of nightmare into this scenario, a day or two ago I read an interview with Tolminson Holman of THX fame who was talking about work on a 10.2 system. I've got a separate AV system which is 5.1 channel and based around 2 pairs of identical floorstanders for the front and surround channels, and that system looks a little like Easter Island on a bad day. Doing 10.2 with freestanding speakers would be my idea of hell. I'm forced into using free standing speakers for the 5.1 system, however, because that system is in an open plan area where there is no right wall between the space where the system is set up and the dining area adjacent. The only reason I can get away with it is because my wife isn't around or it would be a 3.1 system at most. There are definitely advantages to living alone
I've always had a dedicated room for the 2 channel audio system since moving to this huse, and I've always had the speakers out in the middle of the room in an Audio Physic style setup here. To some degree that's really 'letting your freak flag fly' as David Crosby once put it. I really enjoy the sound of that system and appreciate the benefits that came with being able to get the speakers much further away from the walls than they were in my previous home, but I'm also practical enough to acknowledge that most people don't have a room where they can put the speakers 2 metres in front of one wall and 1.3 metres or so away from the side walls. In a lot of cases, up against the walls or tucked into the corners would genuinely be the most practical placements from a utilitarian viewpoint. It's good to actually see more attention being given to 'real world' friendly placement options, even if they're not what I'm looking for for either of my systems.
I have a very lively suspended wooden floor.After a simple experiment with a stack of patio tiles (WAF = 0) under each B&W demonstrated the effectiveness of a mass decoupling I built the following:
Wooden tray filled flush to the top with dry sand. Weight approx 20Kg.
Speakers resting directly on the sand. Clearance around them only 2-3mm so sand not visible. WAF = 5 and rising.
I built these for my bedroom system. They work very, very well with my sub/sat system. Just a thought.
Hi Orpheus. I'm normally with David on the light & rigid school. However, speakers are different than source components.Unlike sources like CDPs or tunrtables, speakers are vibration producers . They do need to be isolated from other vibrations, but they also need the most stable platform from which to produce their own vibrations. Mass loading the stand and coupling the speaker to it helps do that.
For the stands mass... Like, er, Dick, below, I'd select something to help damp vibration in addition to providing a good, massive base. Solid MDF will supply mass, but won't be as effective at providing damping (or as much mass) as sand or lead/steel shot.
Not much experience so take my comments with caution.I tend to have a theoretical preference for the light and rigid school, or at least the view that you shouldn't add mass simply for the sake of adding mass. I would prefer light stands so I probably wouldn't choose either of your 2 options, the solid MDF or the sand filled box, as my first option. Having said that, I use a pair of Dynaudio stands with my Dyn Contour 1.3 SEs and those stands are heavier than any stands I would have made had I gone the DIY route and the Dyns sound great on them. I'd expect that since I'd expect Dynaudio to make stands to suit their own speakers. My stands are an old Dynaudio design which can't be filled so I haven't been able to experiment with them.
That raises the question of what Brian Cheney recommends for his speakers, and whether they prefer lighter or heavier stands. I don't think there's a single answer that suits all speakers. From comments and reviews, it appears to me that some speakers sound better on lighter stands and some on heavier. I did notice differences in the sound of my previous speakers when I played around with the stands I was using with them and while I found that sand or lead shot definitely added to bass weight, I found in the end that I preferred the sound with the stand cavity filled with compressed polyester batting to damp ringing, even though that added virtually no mass at all. I lost a little bass weight that way but I thought I got a flatter and more extended bass response that was a little more tuneful as well.
For a really light stand design that would be considerably lighter than any of your 2 suggestions, I'd use a single vertical piece for the 'beard' with another vertical piece behind it at right angles so, in plan view, the 2 pieces looked like a "T". Put a plate on the top and bottom of that and still use spikes. You could damp the stand by adding something like Dynamat to one side of each piece where it was basically out of sight.
I'd start of by finding out what Brian Cheney recommends and go from there. That may mean making stands which can be filled and it may not. If I was going to go with solid wood, I'd probably try to alternate the MDF layers with something else just to break up the resonance pattern of the stand, though that would make them a bit more expensive to build.
Make a hollow column with four pieces of 3/4" MDF and fill it. I've used two pieces 3" wide and two pieces 1-1/2" wide to make a column 3" square. One inch MDF or two 3/4" pieces sandwiched together make a nice base. That would be more inert than using just MDF. And don't eat the lead shot. It's poisonous.
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