Review of a Samson MD5 mike desk stand

I bought a couple of these some years ago, unfortunately.  While good, at first, the crimped‑on mike thread at the top soon went bad, on both of them (the crimp, that is).  It went loose, and it rattles.  The last thing you want on any mike stand is parts that rattle, particularly the bit the mike is attached to.

This is a fundamental flaw on many mike stands, and it doesn't need to be.  They'd tapped a thread into the tube at the other end (that goes into the base), they could have done the same at both ends.  And I've other mike stands where they'd crimped the end on, and done so properly (I have some that are around 30 years old that have nothing wrong with them, and have had a lot of use).

The base section has a reasonable amount of weight to it, it shouldn't topple over unless you tried attaching a gooseneck to it instead of just sitting a mike at the pipe's height.  The rough dark grey paint on it is an absolute bugger to keep clean (I use microphone gear in video production work, where it does actually get seen), and you can see the muck still visible in these photos after they've had a good scrub clean.  Any dust that lands on it shows up, and is hard to remove.  Cloths get torn up as if you were attacking them with sandpaper, paper towels leave shredded paper behind, about the only thing to survive them is a scrub with a shoe brush.  And being dark grey rather than black makes it harder to hide any dings (you can't do the usual dot it with black texta trick without it showing).

Underneath there's a foam ring that it sits on.  It gives the base a softer surface to sit on that shouldn't damage whatever you place it on.  I wouldn't call it any kind of sound isolation buffer, though.  It's too firm, for that.