@limomangus
Your pontification that speaker stands are built like Steinway pianos is dead wrong and patently ridiculous. Nobody said that nor did anybody intimate anything of the sorts
Rather, go back and reread what was actually posted, . What WAS presented was that HARBETH has thin-walled speaker box cabinets that facilitates a certain resonance capabilities in its bespoke cabinet box design. The lightweight open design speaker stands are complimentary there to maximize the box design to address unwanted damping and muddying of the midrange ….that assist with energy dissipation of the cabinet box design to do its job.
In detail:
HARBETH speakers incorporate the thin-walled speaker design made famous by the BBC. The cabinets are thinner and lighter than most speakers of their size, allowing for some movement of the cabinet with very specific and strategic damping, rather than an attempt to damp all-around. ….. = you have an intentionally more resonant speaker (the thin-walled SPEAKER BOX as a whole alone is gently resonant in the context function of a piano or violin soundboard …. Not the speaker stands.)
Speakers from Harbeth and Spendor, et al, pioneered the use of deliberately thin-walled plywood cabinets with minimal damping of individual panels. Using that approach, the English companies were able to keep energy storage reasonably low, and the effects of cabinet resonances could be minimized by spreading them out among many low-amplitude points.
“Let’s accept that we cannot dispose of all that energy," designer and owner Alan Shaw continues. "Instead, let’s steer it away from where it’s acoustically objectionable—the mid frequencies—down to where it’s not objectionable—the very low frequencies—and make the box [walls] thin, and manipulate those resonances by adding mass and damping the panels, and pull it all down to the bottom. So, you’ve got this extremely clean midband and this sort of warm, involving low end, which is ideal for some music."
The role of preferred speaker stands for HARBETH are to simply assist to mimimize unwanted damping and energy dissipation issues by the box design. TONTRAEGERs employ "extended tenons" atop each column, which are said to "allow direct absorption of cabinet resonances and decouple the speaker from the ground." (The quotes are from fidelisav.com.) th IIndividual "ToneBeds"—oval hollows on top of the tenons—are said to "prevent vibration bridges";
