Buying used makes a ton (or at least ~30 lbs) of sense, although I had no luck with this route when I was in the market for speaker stands a decade ago. Details are hazy at this point, but I think part of the problem was that I have small speakers (Linn Tukans) and needed fairly tall stands to get them to the appropriate height for my listening station; 20" or 24" stands are easier to come by. I eventually ended up with these Canadian-made 28" Target HS70 guys, which I scored for around $70 less than what MusicDirect wants for the current version. Very happy with them.lotharsandwich wrote: Fri Jul 09, 2021 4:05 pm I'm interested in what people here think about speaker stands. We have some nice small-ish speakers (ELAC Debut--whatever the cheapest model is) and want them off the bookshelves where they've been living. Commercial speaker stands seem to vary wildly in price and it's unclear to me what's worthwhile for speakers like ours.
Can anyone recommend or warn against any particular model or approach?
In addition to filling them with sand, the other thing I've found makes a dramatically audible difference is properly coupling them to the floor. My apartment has wall-to-wall Berber, so I had to actually stand on the bottom plates to get the spikes to penetrate to the floorboards. Bass resolution improved significantly when I did that. Oh, and coupling the speakers to the top plates with Blu-Tack, but I reckon everyone already knows that.