Am I crazy????? Try THIS

Absolutely the best way to locate speakers (from the acoustic point of view). Not popular with wives. Ignore all the talk about the speakers moving. They don't.

Line...I have a little Boston Acoustics A40 that I will try. I have weighed it (10 pounds) and trussed it up with a rope so I can hang it. I haven't got around to doing the experiment yet...will report results.

Hanging sceptics will never be convinced until they try it. For those who have a logical bent, the following points may be of interest.

1. The mass of the speaker cone, and the air it moves, is tiny compared with the mass of the loudspeaker enclosure. For this reason movement of the enclosure will be unmeasurable. Vibration of the typical enclosure wall due to internal sound pressure will far exceed motion of the entire enclosure.

2. If the ropes or chains that suspend the speaker are three feet or more long, the pendulum swinging frequency of the rig will be 1 Hz or lower. No audio signal can excite swinging at this frequency.

3. The loudspeaker cone that emits midrange sound is vibrating a great deal at lower frequency, and when LPs are played, pushed in and out at subsonic frequency due to record warp. This does affect sonic quality, tolerable, but much more than any loudspeaker enclosure vibration.

4. When music is played the instruments move around a good deal, and even audiophiles don't usually put their heads in a clamp when they listen. Even if the speakers should move around a bit it wouldn't matter.

In my opinion, enclosure vibration is not a real issue however you mount it, (so long as it isn't so loose that it rattles) but hanging the speakers in free space away from floor and walls is good. Tall skinny speaker stands do the same thing.

Albertporter...True, but...with the exception of Klipshorns and some Allison (sp?) speakers that were designed with room boundries in mind I find that the bass augmentation due to walls and floor sounds false to me. I prefer less bass, unless I can get it directly from the speaker.

I suppose it depends very much on the speaker used. Two that I have heard that were great suspended were Maggies (with a cathedral ceiling) and (believe it or not) Bose 901 (original model).

Line...You need two chains to avoid the speaker pointing in different directions. If you use three chains, it can't swing either.

Newbee...Yes that's what Newton said, but he also explained how to calculate how much that reaction would be. We agree that other effects swamp speaker movement, if any.

As I said, some people will continue to believe that music will set suspended speakers swinging, until they actually try it. Of course (unless you use three chains) they can swing if you get them started some other way, like a room fan.

Line...Unfortunately no audiophile on this site would confess to having Bose 901s, so we can't check this out. :-) Maybe I'll give it a try (quickly so the wife doesn't see) with a Maggie.

Your point is well taken that those Bose 901s have a lot of driver relative to the enclosure. But the only way for a tiny push to get a heavy pendulum swinging is if the force is timed and repeatedly applied at exactly the pendulum swinging frequency: in our case this would be 1 Hz or lower. However, audio signals would push and pull more or less equally at 20 Hz or higher, with no mechanism to get synced up with the pendulum swing. Maybe you could do it with a specially designed test signal if you had a DC-coupled amp.

The experiment has been run, and here are the results.

The Boston Acoustics speaker weighing ten pounds was suspended by a single rope, so that it was about ¼ inch above a table top..just about ear level for a seated person. The center of the speaker was 63 inches from the pivot point in the ceiling, and the period of pendulum swing was measured as 2.5 seconds, which is 0.4 Hz. Loud organ music was played…as loud as the speaker could handle.

Because of the way the speaker was hung it never completely stopped swinging at 0.4 Hz. The motion was about 1/8 inch peak to peak. (The motion was easy to evaluate because the speaker was ¼ inch from the table top). This was with no music playing. If I were going to hang speakers permanently I guess I would use three ropes/chains.

When the music started the small motion of the speaker was very carefully observed for any change relative to what was happening before. There was absolutely no effect as a result of playing the music. The test was repeated about five times.

This is the first time I have hung a speaker in many years, and although when I did I never was conscious of them moving, I must admit that I never looked for movement at the level of this experiment.

By the way, the little box sounded much better than I expected, and I think that I have solved the problem of where to put the rear speakers in my HT set up. Up till now the B&W 550s have just been kicking around behind the couch.