Best stands for Proac Response 2

Blu tak is not a coupler. Quite the contrary. It will act as glue would to hold your speakers to the stands. If that's what you think coupling is, forgeddabout it. The path from speaker to Earth must (if you want to couple) be free of ANY absorbing material. Yeah, the sand makes the stand heavy. One big fat resonant absorbing monster. Not what you want to do when coupling to the Earth. Ed, if you want to effectively couple your speakers to the stands, you should place the speakers on cones, coupled to the stands. Although you're mass loading with the sand or lead, at the same time you're absorbing all resonances: good and bad. The audiotweak (we will hear from him) explains it better. If you go to audiopoints.com and read their white paper, you'll better understand the principles of coupling. peace, warren

I read the audiopoints paper. Frankly, for all their talk of coulomb friction, they are doing precisely what I'm talking about. F = dP/dt; typically this means the bigger the mass, the more force required to move it. The idea is to create (in effect) the bloody heaviest "virtual" speaker you can. That way, the force imparted by the moving bits creates less displacement of the whole thing (i.e., damping). I don't care if you glue it or spike it together (er, that speaker cabinet probably has some glue in it, BTW), as long as the end result is something that, from a physics POV, looks like a larger mass. Cones work well, I'll grant you that. So does blu tac (blu tak, whatever) in certain applications (like the RS2/RS2 interface).

I hate to say it, but the marginal difference between filling your stands with their magic pixie dust and lead shot or sand is pretty negligible at best--the coupling is really the issue. To the extent sand or lead shot "absorbs" resonances, so will their "micro bearing steel fill." This stuff "absorbs" resonances by the action of friction--they rub against each other and generate heat, thus dissipating energy. This will happen no matter what you put in there.

All that stuff about transferring resonance to a point below the spike? 'natch. Its not a magic of their points, its a simplistic way of saying that if its coupled to earth, the large majority of the vibrational force at any moment (proportional to the weight of the speaker/stand versus the earth) is affecting the earth, not the speaker/stand.

BTW, its not "Ed," its "Eric." ; )

Can you use BDR Racing cones under the speakers on the stand instead of Blue Tak? Would this be a better coupler. Would the speakers not be stable on top of BDR cones Or use Blue Tack under the BDR to hold in place then put speakers on top. i think you best be careful of speakers falling off if i did that. Any info on this way . I now use only Blue Tack to couple the Merlins to my Osiris stands.