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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
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tecknik
483 posts
 
Being retired with lots of time on my hands, I've been playing around more with the mixture and have added more lead weights and have filled the last 1/4 with eggs crates, cotton, really packed down.

The Dynaudio stand 6 have TackAudio footers on the bottom with Alto_ Extemo Lyd II mounted on top of the stand with the S25 sitting on top of the Lyd II.

I have also made sure that each stand weight is exactly the same ( 30 kilos,) along with being perfectly level and both the same height. With the Dynaudio S25,s being 44 1/2 from floor to the top of the speaker.

Speakers must be a mirror of each other for optimal imagine, stage ect. The speakers from the tweeter to the front wall 69 inches, 53 1/4 side walls to tweeter. Total weight with speaker and stand is 44.2 kilos.

All this has added up to a larger life like soundstage, tighter bass and excellent imaging along with all the other audiophile bla bla bla.

Im a tweaker, what can I say.


craig16229
15 posts
 
I don't have any advice, but do have a story about lead and learning something about physics :-)  Not long after I bought KEF 103/3's back in the late 80's, I had the special speaker stands that come with them filled with melted lead by a local factory I knew.  What I did not anticipate was that as the lead cooled it expanded - like water in a bottle in a freezer.  Uh oh.  Without quickly putting heavy duty metal straps around the outsides of the stands, they would have split wide open.  In the end it worked out, and the vertical part of each stand is like a solid lead column surrounded by the wood of the stand.  Heavy for sure, and a roommate a few years later somehow ran into one a broke his big toe.
geoffkait's avatar
geoffkait
23,365 posts
 
How did it sound? Lol. For those who admire sand or rice solutions, I suggest taking a gander at super smooth and super spherical glass microspheres, the operation of which is rather quite superior to non symmetrical sand and rice. These little babies are not cheap, what price glory?
craig16229
15 posts
 

How did it sound? Do you mean when my roommate ran into one and broke his toe? The sound was VERY loud and forward, without a hint of distortion. I could clearly hear every intonation of his vocalizations. LOL.

I thought it improved the sound, but not in a jaw dropping way. Honestly, though, I am audiophile lover but not an audiophile owner or expert. My gear is honestly mid-fi. Maybe the biggest benefit of filling them with melted lead (and narrowly getting away with it) is that my roommate did not knock the speaker over the day he collided with it, which probably would have snapped the KEF from the stand and broken it.

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