The Complete Handbook of Musical Instrument Amplifier Stands

Chapter 1: Understanding Musical Instrument Amplifier Stands

In the most direct terms, a musical instrument amplifier stand is a physical frame designed to elevate, angle, and stabilize an amplifier for a specific purpose. The purpose is rarely about looks and almost always about physics: the speaker's relationship to the floor, to your ears, and to the audience's ears. When you place a combo amp directly on the floor, your ears and the device's sound projection are at a functional disadvantage, especially in a room with walls or other geometry that creates an acoustic shadow. A stand changes the angle or the height, thereby altering the way sound waves, which are intensely directional at mid and high frequencies, travel through the space you occupy.

First, consider the physical reality of a speaker. It is a piston, pushing air to create pressure waves. The wave it creates is not a perfect sphere that expands outward uniformly; it is a complex, directional shape. High-frequency drivers in particular, such as the horn or tweeter in a two-way speaker, are highly sensitive to being pointed directly at your ear. If you have ever played through a small combo amp on the floor while standing up, you have experienced the distinct feeling that the amp sounds "boxy" or indistinct. That is not imagination. Your ears are registering a seriously distorted frequency response curve because the floor is absorbing low frequencies, and the high-frequency driver is aimed at your knees. This is not a tone deficiency in