confused about equipment racks


I have been considering either a commercial or a DIY rack for my components.
The problem is do you isolate or couple?
I'm good with speaker spikes which couple the speaker to the house.
But what about a CD player? Isolate? Couple to something massive? Why do I read about Maple butcher block?
I've read about people who swear tennis balls are good. Others use hockey pucks or handball balls, whole or cut in half.
Steel shot, lead shot, cat litter and a host of 'custom' ($$$$) products to fill tubing.
All sorts of weird (to me) theories about resonance / damping / microphonics and related phenom.

Any opinions or stuff I can READ to try to straighten this out. Please, not too much advertiser hyperbole.

thanks in advance::
magfan

Showing 1 response by krell_man

Personally, I wonder if it's not just a personal choice more than one way being better than another.

I used the Sistrum stand for years and really liked it. I've now switched to HRS M3 isolation bases and find them equally satifying in my system.

It seems that the bottom line is that as the sound waves bounce around your room and come back to hit your components. You want them to vibrate or be affected as little as possible. This keeps the vibrations from adding noise to the musical signal. How you accomplish that is your choice.

Something else to maybe consider is the size of your room. In my 10' x 12' room there's a lot more signal bouncing around than in a 16' x 20' room with an open end.

Chuck