Mapleshade boards under speakers

Platforms under speakers alter the dispersion characteristics of a speaker no? I tried it and hated it. Under my subs however..now that did wonders for them:O)

Right now I'm trying a 2by2 sheet of 3/4"thick birch ply, and loving it, tight, articulate, without accentuating anything. The maple has to be better than this or it's going back.

Dave Pogue, who made a comment here back in July, just got Mapleshade custom stands for his Gallo Ref. 3 speakers. The stands are big 4" thick maple platforms with the really heavy Megafeet and Heavyfeet under them. I brought one of my Ref. 3 speakers over to his place to hear the difference between my stock speaker and one of his speakers the new base. The Mapleshade stands made a HUGE improvement. So much so that I've ordered some for myself. This was on a carpet-covered cement floor, not a wood floor.

I spoke with Pierre a little while back about my setup with Gallo 3.1s. My current sound is so-so, and I'm 99% sure that it's all about the room.

Pierre's take on things is that it has nothing to do with the room, and that I should REMOVE all my absorption panels because they mess up sound. Then, if I add the 4" maple stands to the Gallos, and ideally ANOTHER 4" mape stand UNDER these, then magically the sound will be 100% better.

oh, also his rebuilt scott receivers sound vastly better than every tube amp on the marked under $5000 MSRP, and SS amp on the market under $15,000 MSRP.

While this may be a worthwhile upgrade to the Gallos (or any other speaker) his hyperbole pretty much scares me away from doing business with him.

He also recommends to sit no more than 5' back from the Gallos. The Gallos sound MUCH better to me from 10' feet away...

However - I do have the Mapleshade Liszt solo piano CD, and it is spectacular. Kind of a strange situation....

Chas,

I recently purchased new speakers (Audiokinesis Planetarium Betas) to replace my SoundLabs. Now, the Planetariums are superb, but I found that I was missing some of the height dimension in the soundstage. The solution was to raise the main speakers to change the relative angle at my listeningposition. Initially, I tried a stopgap of stacked books just to see if it would do what I wanted. Big difference, in the positive sense. Then I remembered my old amp stands, which I had custom made from 4" lyptus (even denser than maple). That did it. In addition to solving the soundstage problem, midbass tightened up considerably. You can see these in my system photo if you care to have a look. The best part? The guy who did them charged me a total of $300 for both stands, far less than Mapleshade's equivalents would have been.

Speaking of Mapleshade, you'll also notice in the system pic that I'm a big fan of their Samson racks. However, I fully agree that Pierre goes way overboard with some of his claims.