Speaker Plinths

Unsuspected by most audiophiles, your floor and how you mount your speakers on that floor affects your sound even more than your room's acoustics. That's an empirical fact we've been able to demonstrate in hundreds of listening rooms. Draining sound-muddying vibrations out of your speaker's enclosure is crucial for good sound. That's what spikes (or even better, brass footers) are for. But to do any good those drained vibrations have to go somewhere, that is, into a receiving 'sink' that will benignly receive and dissipate them without harmful reflections. Even the best-sounding of floors, that is, old-fashioned solid wood planks, aren't adequate sinks because they're too thin (3/4" planks or less)and thus have a somewhat deadening effect. Modern plywood or 'engineered' wood is thinner and even more overdamped and more deadening. Concrete, tile or stone floors utterly cripple the sound of your speakers (and carpeting makes it worse) because they reflect back nearly 100% of the received vibrations, albeit in highly distorted form. That causes muddied bass, a smeared midrange, and treble harshness.     

Thus many if not most perceived room problems are actually caused by inadequate or really bad-sounding floors. Instead of spending thousands on room acoustic treatments that fail to address the root problem, Mapleshade offers an evidence-based and guaranteed upgrade for any floor: drain your speakers' vibrational energy, not into the floor, but into massive maple platforms rigidly mounted above the floor via large, screwed-in brass footers. First and foremost, maple provides an audibly better, cleaner sounding sink material than pine, spruce, cherry, walnut or oak floors. Equally important, these 2" (or 4") Maple Speaker Plinths provide 2-2/3 (or 4-1/3) times more mass to dissipate vibrations—and vastly more rigidity—than even good solid wood floors.

To double the sonic upgrade of our Maple Speaker Plinths, replace your speakers' steel spikes or damped composite feet with our much more rigid and massive brass footers to optimally couple each speaker to its Plinth. We make Maple Plinths to fit both smaller and larger size floorstanders. To increase the mass and reduce speaker rocking, we recommend a Plinth at least two inches larger than the speaker width and depth. If you're on concrete, tile or stone, upgrading to the 4" thickness is highly recommended. Note that, in careful listening comparisons, the effect of an extra 2" height is minuscule compared to the major improvements in bass, mids and treble.