This paper presents a composite control strategy for the active suppression of vibration due to the unknown disturbances, such as external excitation, harmonic effects and control spillover, as well as high-frequency accelerometer measurement noise in the all-clamped stiffened plate. The proposed composite control action based on the modal approach, consists of two contributions including feedback part and feedforward part. The feedback part is the well-known PID controller, which is widely used to increase the structure damping and improve its dynamic performance close to the resonance frequencies. In order to get better performance for vibration suppression, the weight matrixes is optimized by chaos sequence. Then an improved disturbance observer (IDOB) as the feedforward compensation part is developed to enhance the vibration suppression performance of PID under various disturbances and uncertainties. The proposed IDOB can simultaneously estimate the various disturbances dynamically as well as measurement noise acting on the system and suppress them by feedforward compensation design. A rigorous analysis is also given to show why the IDOB can effectively suppress the unknown disturbances and measurement noise. In order to verify the proposed composite control algorithm (IDOB-PID), the dSPACE real-time simulation platform is used and an experimental platform for the all-clamped stiffened plate active vibration control system is set up. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness, practicality and strong anti-disturbances ability of the proposed control strategy.