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Just how much do speakers suppose to vibrate?

I have a pair of Totem Staff speakers and when I play music with some bass content I can feel the top of the speakers vibrating to some degree. I like the sound of the speakers and I just wonder if the speakers suppose to vibrate this way. I do not play music very loud (around 85 dB peaks) and yes I tried stuffing the lower chamber with sand, but I did not like the result. Also I tried putting some iron weights over the top of the speakers and the vibrations lessen about half (this according with a vibrometer app for android). According to the vibrometer the vibrations go as high as  IV in the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale. Is this level of vibrations normal for this speakers? Also I should mention that the speakers are spiked directly to the floor which is compose of tiles over concrete.
tiofelon
danvignau's avatar
danvignau
935 posts
 

I put the 6" drivers from my vibrating B&W DM 14's in my B&W Matric cabinets, ad they sound much cleaner with the wine rack innards to damp the vibration. I put 803 drivers in the DM 14 cabinets and they got muddy.

Reversed for good.

soundsrealaudio's avatar
soundsrealaudio
756 posts
 
The wave energy from the back of the drivers can not be destroyed. An example of how this will affect the sound…..If the cabinet has an area that is 100 times larger then the driver then if it vibrates at only 100th as much the sound coming from the cabinet will be equal to the sound from the front of the driver. 



soundsrealaudio's avatar
soundsrealaudio
756 posts
 
Weights may or may not work. The best outcome would be to absorb those vibrations so the whole room isn't affected. Since good speakers, or the best speakers cabinets use composite cabinet walls, thus combining the beneficial effects of two different materials, you might try different materials to place on top of your cabinets. A good example of this would be to ping  a wine glass. When is resonating simply place your finger on one edge. It stops pretty quickly. Sand bags or even a small bag of a grain like quinoa just to test things out. Heavy weights are not likely to be good absorbers rather they might make that energy move to the front panel and worse yet out through the front of your driver, a disaster that few designers consider. 

geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
Perhaps just a little off the original topic but most speakers are stuffed with way too much fiberglass stuffing. Performance will be considerably improved by removing most of the stuffing. Let the speakers breathe.
larryi
4,075 posts
 

Whether you add mass to the speaker, or clamp its sides, or change the platform/stand the speaker is sitting on, or change the way the speaker couples to the floor, you are altering the tuning.  Whether this is good or bad really is a matter of taste, so experimentation is the only way to find out what would be beneficial. 

There are a number of speakers that, by design, have thin walls that vibrate quite a bit.  They are designed to rapidly dissipate vibrational energy instead of storing and releasing energy more slowly (which is what thick, heavy walls tend to do).  Examples would be Spendor classic speakers and Harbeth speakers.  I recently heard the Harbeth 40.2 and I thought that this is a pretty good speaker, so that technique does work.

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