Argosy, Raxxes, Isoacoustic to name a few. Even the metal ones from Ultimate which are pretty sturdy do not weight much. So would you consider their stands no good for studios?
In general, yes. That might sound like a pretty arrogant statement, but there are a lot of things from a lot of manufacturers that don't make much sense from the point of view of the science of acoustics, yet people still buy them and put them in their studios. They might look nice, but they don't actually make much sense, acoustically.
For example, diffusers on the walls of small studios. The very guys who originally figured out how diffusers work, discovered the equations behind them, and wrote scientific papers and books about them, make it abundantly clear that they should not be placed anywhere that would put your head too close, as you'd be in the zone where artifacts occur. Yet, there's an awful lot of tiny home studios out there that buy skylines and QRDs and Schroeders, and slap them on their back wall, thinking they have done something good for their room...
Or the even more common case of people trying to "float their floor" on 2x2s with rubber pucks and a sheet of 1/2" plywood on top, thinking that's what makes a great floor...
Or the very commonly seen situation of having small near-fields on the meter bridge of a large console...
Or any number of other things that people do to their studios, not realizing that it will make things worse, not better.
Such as using light-weight stands for their speakers.
Eric already pointed out the issue here: if Argosy were to offer speaker stands massive enough to be useful, nobody would buy them. Would you want to pay a few hundred dollars for heavy stands, then another few hundred for the shipping?
I have visited and recorded in a few professional recording studios and have seen similar stands in use.
I'm sure you have: So have I. But that doesn't make it acoustically
correct! I have also been in more than just a few studios with egg-crates on the walls and carpet on the ceiling, but that doesn't mean that its is a good idea to build a studio like that!
My philosophy is this: If I am going to all the trouble, time and expense of building a studio, then I want it to be the best it possibly can be, so I won't put anything in there that doesn't enhance the acoustics. Why would I? It makes no sense, to me, to spend a huge amount of money on building a great room, then put something in it that harms the acoustics.
Some people really don't care, I guess. Which is why you often see very questionable things in studios, that you just know are creating acoustic issues. I never have figured that out: Why would they bother building a great room if they don't care about acoustics?
To you knowledge, which company makes adequate stands?
As one of the forum administrators, I try not to endorse specific products or manufacturers unless I have personal experience with the product in one of the studios I have designed and/or built, or the product is so well known already that my mentioning it is not an issue. And for this type of thing (speaker stands), what I normally do is to point to threads on the forum about the subject, as well as off-site articles by experts in the field, so folks can check that out, learn from what others know, and draw their own conclusions about which products are good or bad. In fact, instead of recommending that people buy stands, I normally recommend that they make them. It's not hard to do, and gives you more control over the end result.
Is there something we need to know about mass vs. vibration when choosing a monitor stand?
In general, the more massive the stand is, the less it will vibrate itself, the lower its resonant frequencies will be, and the lower will be the transmission of vibration into the floor.
Perhaps each stand will need to be made and calibrated to support a specific speaker model, and also take into consideration the individual speaker power and bass frequency response, to increment mass in the stand, right?
I somehow doubt you'd need to go that far!
But in general, for a larger, heavier speaker it would be good to have a more massive stand than you'd use for a much lighter speaker. Of course, there are equations that you could use to calculate the optimum mass for each speaker, if you really wanted to to, but I don't see the need to go to that extreme.
Is it a simple balance or a support issue?
Not really: It's an acoustic issue, and the article that Eric linked for you covers some of the points. Did you read it? Light weight stands pick up the speaker vibration themselves (even with isolation pads), and the stand vibrates in sympathy with the speaker. Meaning that you have an extra source of sound in the room, which muddies up the clarity that you would have had without it. Lightweight stands can also transmit that same vibration into the floor, making the entire floor vibrate in sympathy. And of the floor vibrates, then that can be transmitted back up the desk legs, and radiated from the desk surface, which you will hear. This is where it get's funky: since sound travels through solid objects much, much faster than it travels through air, the vibration that took that indirect path down your speaker stands and back up to the desk surface, will then reach your ears BEFORE the direct sound from the speakers, which came along much more slowly, through the air. This is sometimes called "early-early" sound, and the transmission path can be surprisingly efficient. If this occurs, then the early-early sound interferes with the direct sound, causing phase cancellation, comb filtering, and similar artifacts.
There's also the issue of resonance in the stand itself: When the music stops, the stand carries on vibrating for a short time, and therefore extends the note longer in time that it really is.
There are other, lesser issues too.
In summary, the overall effect is that light-weight stands subtract from the room acoustics, while heavy stands do not.
And having said all of the above, some of those apparently "light weight" stands you see in catalogs and studios are not light weight at all! Some are built hollow, and designed to be filled with somthing heavy, such as sand. Some people even fill their speaker stands with lead shot. So even though they LOOK light, they might actually be very heavy.
- Stuart -