I have recently acquired an extra pair of rather large speakers, which are now attached to my amp. Due to space restrictions, at the moment my scanner is sat atop one of the speakers (the speaker is on its side, under my desk).
Is this a daft thing to do? Will the magnets in the speaker do bad things to my scanner? Will the, uh, whatever’s-inside-a-scanner do bad things to the speaker? Or am I just being overly paranoid?
If anyone can set my mind at rest, I’d much appreciate it.
The vibration from the speaker would be the biggest worry, I should think.
Hmmm, yeah, hadn’t thought of that.
I don’t really do much scanning, and can turn the music down/off if necessary. I just don’t want to have to buy a new scanner when everything starts coming out purple. Or whatever.
Well, since scanners don’t depend on anything magnetic being inside them, and speakers aren’t harmed by bright light, I imagine you’ll be fine.
Unless scanners do have magnetic things inside them. Which as far as I know, they don’t. …Yeah.
Maybe that should have been my question.
But thanks, that’s kind of what I thought, I shall leave things as they are and see what happens.
What I actually meant was that the vibration may permanently damage some of the delicate machinery inside the scanner - they are fairly simply machines, but consider the precision of engineering required to scan something at thousands of DPI - something is quite likely to get shaken out of adjustment.
That…is a good point.
I need a bigger room.
Perhaps you could rig up some kind of shelf that was freestanding over the speaker (with supports going down either side) or just fix a shelf on the wall…
You have need to be concerned. My Nikon F1 SLR manual strongly urges owners not to let the camera routinely ride around on the floor or in the trunk of an automobile. Consistent exposure to vibration will eventually loosen up the internal workings of any mechanical device.
However, buying a new scanner every year may be cheaper than renting a bigger room. 
While I scrounge 2nd hand computer parts for fun, I’ve never had occasion to buy a scanner 2nd hand. But from what I’ve heard, the lightbulb is a weak link in the system. (The “glass” getting messed up is also common, but you can see that without testing it.) Getting a new scanner is usually the easiest way of “fixing” it for most people. The vibrations of the speakers may have reduced it’s lifetime. All kinds of bulbs don’t like exposure to vibrations.
The other weak link that could be affected is the guide mechanism for the light/receptor bar. That goes out easily too, but apparently not as much as the bulb. (Consumer grade scanners only. “Real scanners” have a lot of heavy stuff inside that can take some abuse.)
What bulbs? All the ones I’ve seen use LEDs.
LEDs??? This and this are but 2 articles quickly found Googling that refer to fluorescent bulbs as being the most common. Haven’t you ever wondered what was “warming up” when you do your first scans? (Fluorescents don’t need to warm up for “eye” viewing, but for color calibration reasons it’s needed for scanning.)
No. My scanner never needs to “warm up”. It only needs to calibrate, which I assume is something diferent, because it does use LEDs as the light source. Perhaps scanners prior to the development of “white” LEDs used fluorescents?
From How Stuff Works. Admittedly, the scanners I’ve dealt with have been cheap, fairly new ones. Another part of this page says scanners do often use fluorescents or xenon lamps.
Most scanners still use cold cathode lamps, but the LED ones are on the rise, especially the low-powered devices.
My experience of LED-illuminated scanners has been a bad one; I have a Canon 1240U (a USB bus-powered scanner) - if you look at the lamp, it appears to be illuminated with white light, but if you allow your eyes to move, you see a series of red/green/blue lines - indicating that the unit is rapidly cycling through the three colours.
This is further evidenced by the quality of the scans; because the scanner head is moving while the lights cycle, the red, green and blue ‘samples’ are actually not captured from exactly the same place on the source object; this results in an image that (in some cases) displays coloured fringes (looking for all the world like the kind of chromatic aberration you get with some lenses).