[Teknophile]

I have read quite a bit on mounting speakers, mostly on stands, some on mounting on walls. Found some interesting discussions on isolation of vibration, dampening and transfer of sound. What I am curious about, is why no one seems to talk about “hanging of speakers”. I don’t mean hanging as on a wall, I mean hanging as on 4 support wires, suspended from the ceiling. Does anyone do this, or is it just a stupid idea? It seems that it would total isolate any transfer of vibrations. My first post, Thanks for any comments on this topic guys.

 

[slex]

I have read quite a bit on mounting speakers, mostly on stands, some on mounting on walls. Found some interesting discussions on isolation of vibration, dampening and transfer of sound. What I am curious about, is why no one seems to talk about “hanging of speakers”. I don’t mean hanging as on a wall, I mean hanging as on 4 support wires, suspended from the ceiling. Does anyone do this, or is it just a stupid idea? It seems that it would total isolate any transfer of vibrations. My first post, Thanks for any comments on this topic guys.

It's not stupid idea. Most of the hanging spks are purpose built for live performance. Like the JBL Line Array Speaker systems.

 

[GREQ]

I think the reason that speakers are normally not freely hanging is because sound energy will certainly be lost in this way.

If you think of a loudspeaker transducer as a 'motor', it becomes less efficient at pushing air when the speaker housing is not mounted or resting on a fixed point or surface.
More energy will go into wobbling the speaker housing around in the air, and less going directly from the speaker diaphragm to the air.

I assume that bass frequencies would especially suffer the greatest from hanging and I'd expect most live speaker set-ups to floor-mount their subs, mostly due to their larger size and weight; but if they did hang them I bet they'd perform worse.
That said, I'm pretty sure those concert speakers aren't exactly 'hanging' ... more like they're mounted to extremely tall speaker stands (scaffold).