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Filling speaker stands: sand, lead, steel, rice. Full, half, etc?

With my proac tablettes, I am using 28 inch speaker stands which have two round steel tubes about two inches in diameter.  The stands have spikes into my wooden floor (through carpet) and rubber pads on top.  I have a rather small room 12x12, and I have played around with the speaker positions in the room, finding a pretty sweet spot optimizing the bass and soundstage.  I have done all this with the stands unfilled.

so I am looking for advice on filling the stands. What do I use: sand, steel shot, lead shot, rice?  Do I fill them half full, three quarters, or full? Do I fill all the tubes the same? Can overfill makes things worse?

like most things (i.e. speaker placement) I suspect there will be some trial and error, but as it will be a real pain in the rear to fill/empty/refill the various materials to really compare, I am hoping that there are some lessons learned that the rest of you can share with me to get me pretty close with my first trial.

Alos, what effect will the filling have- should I expect deeper bass, bigger soundstage, greater depth, more detail, or..... better yet what should I not expect to change? This will help me know what I should be listening for as I tweak things.

and finally, should I expect my current optimum speaker position to change with filled stands? Will I have to go through the whole positioning exercise again?

thanks, ( and happy new year)

Bill
meiatflask
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Promote that person!
wcfeil
464 posts
 
I like filling mine with meatloaf. 

It yields a more organic sound. 
daviddjin
4 posts
 
Hi i recently purchased a pair of speaker stand, bought it for like 35$. I filled the speaker stand as soon as i received them. I filled them with sand but they were a bit wet.. The hole was very small and i spent about 2 hours filling the steel tubes (4 of them, 2 for each stand) my question is.. Can they damage the stands? if yes, what should i do to prevent the rust? It's close to impossible to take out the sand because like i said, the hole where the sand went in was very tiny. Thanks to anyone who responds 
dill
2,525 posts
 
As long as there is no wave action, you should be fine. One could or could have drilled a bigger hole.
meiatflask OP
151 posts
 
As a metallurgical engineer who has spent much of the past 40 years looking at corroded metal,  yes, wet sand will cause steel to rust.  (I assume the stand/tubes are steel.)  ideally, you want to dry the sand out. Practically, this can’t happen unless you remove the sand. Theoretically, you could bake the sand filled tubes or put them in a lab vacuum, but neither of these is realistic.  Partly because the moisture would have to escape through the holes- and with small holes and slots of sand that is many inches away from the holes it would take along time for the entire sand to dry out.

fortunately, indoors under controlled environment- the rust process will be very slow, taking years to produce a light rust skin on the inside, and probably decades to affect the structure/thickness of the tubes,  and the sound would only be affected if there was serious thinning of the walls.  If the inside of the tubes was painted (which is doubtful unless they dip paint the tubes rather than spray them), rust will be much slower, so slow you can ignore it.  Adding a rust preventative (wd40) to the sand could help, but only if you could shake it up enough to coat the entire inside, which seems impossible, so not worth the effort.
So, assuming the sand was “damp” and not dripping wet, you should not have a problem.   If it were me, I would just not worry.  Perhaps start off your listening with Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps.
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