Your Floor Affects Sound Quality
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.
Room Treatments Can't Fix Floor Problems
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.
Replace Steel Spikes & Composite Feet
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 floor-standers. 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, midrange and treble.
Finish Options to Suit Any Decor
Our Speaker Plinths shelves are air-dried Ambrosia maple and our hardware is machined from an optimum-sounding brass alloy, simply because our tests show any other materials would degrade sound. However, we offer a variety of handsome maple and brass finishes to suit a wide range of decors.
Our stock SAMSON shelves are hand finished with a clear satin lacquer that beautifully enhances the striking natural grain character of our air-dried maple. We also offer three made-to-order toned lacquer finishes: Natural Cherry, Deep Rosewood, and Black Satin.
Our stock hardware is handsomely hand polished brass. However, we offer the options of Semi-Gloss Black, Metallic Silver and other custom powder coat hardware finishes.
