Mapleshade boards under speakers

Hard to explain, but true: I have Merlin Master VSM's. For two years they have been spiked to the concrete floor under wall-to-wall medium pile carpeting. I've always felt that there was some undesirable deadening of the low-to-mid bass going on. Tried various room treatments. 2' x 4' x 4" bass absorbers angled about a foot behind the speakers did help. But still something was not quite right.

The other day I decided to buck conventional wisdom. I had an intuition to place 1/2" maple shelves from an old Lovan rack I had under the speakers so that they are just sitting freely on the carpeting and the speakers are spiked directly into them. HUGE improvement in bass and no apparent disturbance in any of the other factors such as sound staging, or higher frequencies. In fact, I would say that everything just sounds better. I don't understand the science behind it, but I'd guess that coupling the speakers directly to the concrete floor had the same effect as over-damping a room or the inside of a speaker cabinet. Just goes to show that in this hobby it's good to experiment. And if you're lucky, the best solution is also the free solution.

A couple of weeks ago the Mapleshade unfinished 2 inch boards I ordered arrived and I simply have the Thiel 2.4s placed atop them without any footers through the thin pile carpeting underneath on a suspended floor. WOW, what an improvement in focus, detail and depth of stage. Here's my conclusion: I think maple happens to have the correct resonance, impedance and absorptive properties that allow phase cancelling information to be absorbed while not absorbing in phase musical information. I think it also performs this "filtering" fairly evenly over the audible range. There is a reason why it has long been used to make musical instruments. Would other tone woods work as well or better? Perhaps, but I know that this made a noticeable improvement and my audio buds all agree.

Maple is the right stuff for putting under audio. Thats all there is to say about it.

I tend to agree. Not that I've tried everything else under the sun. Or are about to.

I couldn't afford Mapleshade blocks at the time so I got Myrtlewood plinths from Battlerock Studios. I placed them underneath my KEF 104/2 speakers and got great results. They are a little over 2" thick. The Myrtlewood plinths along with brass footers really helped with the vibration issues I was having with just the KEFs on my floor. I saw give Myrtlewood a shot.