I have been asked to build one for the local symphony. A search has revealed they range from simple boxes to elaborate affairs with internal sounding boards coupled to the top. The problem with in Internet search is that one finds what has or can be done with little hint as to what is acceptable or common. Specifications from the music director has conflicted some information from manufacturers of these things. For example, director thinks a hard top is required while a company that makes a particularly sophisticated one specifies fir plywood.
Fascinating. You've found yourself an almost bottomless rabbit hole to fall into.
I started to look at the literature, but soon realized it was going to be close to hopeless, because the acoustics have not been studied sufficiently, but also because each cellist would have their own opinion of how the podium should sound.
Cello podiums…are designed to amplify sound. The good ones have a spruce soundboard inside the box with cutouts on the sides so the sound can escape and a soundpost that goes from the endpin hole on the top of the box to the soundboard.
I also found an article on how to measure your podium to determine whether you got it right. But even as deep into the engineering as this one goes, it still doesn't explain how to build it or even how it should sound.
Maybe John Aniano can provide some insight (only twice removed from the podium itself ), as he makes cello bows professionally?
I wish I had known of your quest a little earlier. Saturday afternoon I attended a concert where Tchaikovsky's Rococo Variations was performed, and I might have been able to ask some cellists their opinions. As it turns out, the weather was abysmal, and we were delayed in traffic and missed the pre-concert lecture. I would have been sure to have gotten on the road earlier.
Curiously, only the soloist gets to play on a podium. The rest of the cellists (and the bassists) in the orchestra's string section just play on stage platforms, and their metal folding chairs probably don't help a lot either.
Interesting project. I downloaded the PDF of the 1963 design and read the acoustic paper along with the abstracts. This looks to be part 1 of a 2 part study, the first one completed and published in 2017. This quote from the abstract "Results indicate significant energy and useful audible spectrum is transmitted through the endpin of the instrument which could be harnessed to better acoustically amplify the instrument."
There is a statement in the drawing that seems to support the abstract:
I have access to an acoustic simulation code. I am going to print the drawing at work and talk about building an acoustic model with my Belgian colleague. If we do this, I will post updates. Might be a few weeks or more.
There is a classical guitarist who plays with his guitar in the cello position. His guitar has an endpin, and he has a large box that must work like the cello box.
A hard top won't work. It needs to be like a soundboard. If you have ever played with a music box mechanism, you will find all kinds of things that it just lights up. Hard surfaces are not among them. Basically you need a thing like a music box. Having it protected with a hard surface makes sense. The post is a interesting system. What a guitar/cello is, is an air pump. So as long as you pump the air out of the box. The surface of the soundboard, is the diaphragm of the pump, it is not to the same extent, the speaker cone, moving air off it''s surface. I mention this in case on feels the air will get trapped in the box that contains the soundboard. It might not be as good as another design, but conceptually it will still pump.
There is an acoustic principle that applies here. Some people who try to increase the volume of natural instruments pursue the approach of the box, most often by modification of the instrument's box. The principle being that the instrument should resonate over a wider area. But the counter to that is that the energy available does not increase, so one is just diffusing it. And this is what classical guitar players report, they don't always get more volume, but a richer sound, which is important on the guitar as the volume of the sound box is not sufficient to establish the fundamental of the lowest notes (I don't know what the case is with the cello. If you have ever seen a Guitaron, you will see one approach to dealing with that. Possibly more logical once one has pursued the upright playing position. Of course, Cellos have a lot more power available, due to the bow.
So if you are not dealing with more volume in some simple way, but tone and completeness, then you are in a very difficult situation where the box needs to really be a sound box, and compliment the guitar. That is the mount everest of instrument making: making a box (within or outside the instrument) that actually plays as the luthier intended. Making a nice guitar is one thing, but making one that is nice and exactly the instrument one envisaged (dictated in this case by the presence of the principle instrument), that is some task.
Musicians typically don't sit on their instruments, so one has the opportunity to make parts of the instrument light and thin. They will on the podium and they may weigh from an airy 100 pounds to who knows what. I am concluding that a professional is going to be more sensitive to deflections of the top in response to their body moving about than their ear is to whatever micro deflection the top my experience in response to bowing. After all, a cellist typically pokes their instrument into a maple clad stage.
I will be consulting with a cellist next week and her concerns seemed to be more mechanical than acoustical. I have the specification YoYo Ma requires when he performs and they are only the dimensions of the podium- l,w,h.
Unless dissuaded by additional data I am going to build a table like affair- 4 legs with sides that go near to the floor, M&T into the legs, and a void-free plywood top. One end open with a frame covered with speaker cloth that will fit in the opening and face the audience. The rest painted black or draped black.
I think you are both missing something important: The top of the podium is not the soundboard. The cello's end pin contacts the soundboard through a hole in the top of the platform, and the interior soundboard amplifies and colors the sound. The vibrations transferred to the podium from the cellist's feet, the chair legs, the stage floor and even the music stand are not nearly as important, and should probably be dampened as much as possible.
Of course, this is all theoretical, and probably way beyond the needs of any but the top cello virtuosos and their most discerning audiences. I've listened to cellists performing on a cobblestone street.
I'm not missing that point and referred to the soundpost solution and other aspects of that design throughout.
I was addressing a comment that one of the people Bill was in contact with wanted a hard surface on the stand.
Seems there are 3 levels of this kind of thing. Some people simply referred to wanting to ensure they were playing on a wooden stage surface that was consistent venue to venue; some want more volume, in the case of the guitar normally this ends badly in that if you check back at the reasoning for various variations, say the Kasha digression, they end up ultimately described in other term; or the tonal complement.
I'm not overly chastened by comments of overthinking and on great artists, because anyone who has been around artists for any length of time will know they very often have next to zero understanding of their instruments technical details. The opposite is also occurs, with folks like Les Paul inventing their instrument, and others who are very technically informed. A relative of mine is a working musician, very good, he went through a whole classical guitar performance program at university, and he somehow didn't even know about the most basic things like bridge compensation. It is one thing if there is some kind of musical savant who doesn't know, but to go through a 4 year program at a well regarded UK university and not know the most basic details, is pretty amazing if one imagines that program is baseline constructed for the benefit of most professional musicians. Those are easily identifiable holes in their education, you don't even have to get into the hokus pocus of varnish or magical thinking on certain brands of stringed instruments.
Just for grins I looked up the value of Yo Yo Ma's cello, it's worth about $2.5 million. There is no sound board in a podium that I can imagine improving upon the sound of that instrument. I can imagine messing it up.
A couple of thought experiments. First imagine you put the pointy rest into a mass of very soft rubber. I can imagine this sucking (dampening) the sound of the wonderful instrument. Second imagine you place the pointy rest against a massive, dense substrate, you should get very little transfer of energy from cello and it should come alive ( think stage with maple floor). An interesting experiment to run would be to add dense and heavy substrate to top of podium to see if it changed.
I certainly have no input on designing the cabinet but many years ago i did do stereo, TV (black & white) repair in a small shop in my home. I also repaired high end speaker systems like Bose. Last one I repaired for a friend was about 25 years ago. ALL the speaker cabinets were constructed from (it appeared) High density fiber board or particle board. Plywood was a No-No.
An old timer said plywood ruined the audio characteristics of the cabinets! As an aside a Bose speaker itself from a $400 cabinet ran me about $25 ~ $50 direct from Bose.
I've listened to cellists performing on a cobblestone street.