Decouple your speakers from the surface where they sit.

Today’s tip comes courtesy of Eric Blackmer from Earthworks. He was here the other day talking about their new Sigma 6.2 monitors. One of the many great points he brought up was the fact that any surface a studio monitor sits on will sympathetically vibrate with the speaker. This causes a large surface to act a little like a huge but uncontrolled passive radiator, which in turn could significantly compromise the integrity of low frequency information. This phenomenon, which is actually fairly well known, just not talked about a lot, is one major reason why speaker stands often have sharp, pointed tips for their feet. This is specifically to decouple the stands from the surface they are sitting on. If you have your monitors sitting on some large surface, such as a table or a meter bridge, consider figuring out a way to decouple them acoustically from that surface. This can be accomplished with foam or rubber feet. Speaker stands are a better solution because the surface of the stand is generally as small as the footprint of the speaker, and therefore doesn’t provide much of a surface to resonate.