mandryka
pfm Member
No idea!
Russ Andrews ‘Torlite’
(But now I see it's been mentioned!)
No idea!
Old russ and his mind boggling prices.And there's me thinking £250 was extortionate...
Russ Andrews ‘Torlite’
Plantation grown teak is available in this country https://www.brookstimber.com/news-investingforgrowth.phpThey do them in different heights, though if I ever went in this direction I’d custom order from scratch as I really don’t like the top-plate being wider than the JR’s black metal base. I reckon with that sized correctly and in a nice dark walnut they’d look really good. I’d prefer teak as that’s the finish of my 149s, but I assume CITES regulation has done away with that. I’d definitely not go lighter in colour than the speaker.
At this stage I’m just fishing for experiences to see if anyone has gone from a super-heavyweight stand like an R4 to a light wood support. The design makes a lot of sense to me being a fairly wide-legged tripod they are stable (unlike say the AW acrylic stuff), they are slender, so should be fairly light, and being solid wood are inherently self-damped. They are a nice piece of aesthetic design that will certainly suit a 149, and though they likely sell mainly on looks they make a lot of sense to me logically too from a structural perspective.
Dealt with a few posts upthread. I think he’s barking up something like the right tree, at least as far as mass goes, but I part company with the cone tops and spikes.
PS Hard coupling is especially bad with 149s as the black base is only a thin hollow pressed alloy part not a million miles away from a biscuit tin. I find felt pads work the best of anything I’ve tried, and that’s what Jim Rogers provided (though I use thicker ones).
Yup, mid clarity is where i found most improvement. Bass improved also but the mids sprang into life & the sound became more engaging. I would never go back to 80's heavy metal, apart from when i'm playing axe attack of course.I suppose it's a kind of metal/wood change but my Spendor 2/3s went from steel Target stands to sitting on a pair of subwoofers (previously in the system) with Isoacoustics minipucks between speaker and subwoofer. Substantial improvement in bass and mid clarity.
As I recall, the late Art Dudley was an advocate of ditching pointy things in favour of thick felt pads.
@Tony L, just make sure that whatever new stands you get match the height of your existing stands exactly otherwise it will be difficult to separate out the acoustic effects of the stand from the acoustic effects of the change in height. The same applies to isolation pucks, - when I placed OREA under my Dittons I lowered the height of the stand (stacked plywood sheets) to keep the speaker at the same height.https://www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/oddvar-stool-pine-20249330/
Something like this should give you a cheap 'taste' of what wood stands may offer before spending big money on proper stands. Who knows, you may decide to keep them as is
I hadn’t seen that, but good to see. He was also going down the bolt-tightness thing too, I remember one of his columns I think relating to his 301, though maybe the 124, where he’d stripped and cleaned it and felt it sounded like crap, and then realised it was over-tightening it to the plinth that was to blame.
@Tony L, just make sure that whatever new stands you get match the height of your existing stands exactly otherwise it will be difficult to separate out the acoustic effects of the stand from the acoustic effects of the change in height.
This is where audiophile thinking starts going very wrong to my mind. Even in a fairly light speaker like a JR149 there is more than enough mass to stop it moving anywhere meaningful due to broadband audio-frequency vibration. If you think of a typical music signal it contains all frequencies from low bass to high treble and even the very lowest isn’t going to be able to move the cabinet far enough to impact the highest. I suspect what is actually happening can all be put down to exciting sympathetic resonances in the cabinets themselves, in the stands, and in the floor. The drivers are as still as that given cabinet design allows them to be.
No, I certainly don’t want to damp them. I’ve come to the conclusion that low-mass cabinets that lose energy fast in a controlled way (e.g. BBC designs) are *vastly* preferable sonically to my ears to those that attempt to damp and store energy with mass. Most of the speakers I like the least are very heavy boxes. I’m on pretty much the same page with record decks. Beyond a decent rotating mass for speed stability I think weight is best avoided here too. Mass strikes me as very lazy design. Just shovel more crap on until you’ve masked the inherent design limitations!
Mass does not damp. The only way to dissipate the energy is to damp it. Whatever it is. I would assume those aluminium drums of the JR's have damping on the wall inside, as aluminium has one of the lowest damping factors (highest Q) of any material.
over the years trying many different stands I have moved gradually from wood/light construction to more heavier metal stands and this is where I am staying as a preference. With a few exceptions (e.g. with Spendor SA1 or D1, or next up Spendors) heavier metal stands have performed clearly better for me.So, has anyone moved from metal to wood stands?
Constrained layer damping will do everything the BBC cabinets do, but better.