Equipment Rack - How important in the grand scheme of things?

dorkwad

I have Star Sound Sistrum racks that were cut by SS a few years ago so I had 2 shorter and more stable racks. The soundstage became much more pronounced and real after cutting and the bass was even better than before. My racks were now about 26" H with the components on them, and they were 54" high before. The lower the rack the better the sound. It does take up twice the real estate however.

>>>>>That pretty much illustrates the problem with racks and stands in general. I.e.,,the shorter the better. That’s because taller structures amplify seismic vibrations. Since the Sistrum stands don’t isolate against seismic vibration they allow seismic type very low frequency vibration to be transmitted from the floor to the component. Draining alone doesn’t cut it. Same goes for almost any rack. It’s the same as for very tall buildings and skyscrapers - isolation techniques must be incorporated during construction of tall buildings to reduce the effects of seismic type vibration including wind and subways and normal earth crust motion and to prevent collapse due to earthquakes. It’s code in many if not most areas.

By contrast springs are two, two things in one! - they isolate the component from seismic type vibration AND they allow vibration of the component to be drained away. That is why spring based systems are so effective for speakers, for example, they prevent cabinets vibrations from reaching front end electronics AND reduce cabinet resonances.

select-hifi
Max Townshend first launched the Seismic Sink back in the 80’s or 90’s i believe, the design has evolved and is effective down to 3HZ from all directions.

>>>>Just for grins let’s do the math. 😀 If an isolation device is rated for 3 Hz performance what does that really mean? 3 Hz represents the resonant or natural frequency of the device, Fr, derived from the total spring rate and the total mass of the device, including component or speaker. But since the iso device acts as a mechanical low pass filter ⤴️ the isolation itself doesn’t kick in until around 6 Hz at a rate of about 6 dB/octave. So for an interfering frequency of 10 Hz the device is just starting to be effective, maybe only 30% effective. For an interfering frequency of 20 Hz the device will be around 75% effective. But it will be 99% effective at 30 Hz. This illustrates the advantage of getting the Fr as low as possible, 2 Hz or lower would be excellent performance. For speakers the Fr is not as critical since the speaker cabinets don’t generate extremely low frequency vibrations. Just moving the Fr down 1 Hz improves performance at 10 Hz and 20 Hz considerably for front end components. Of all the directions of motion I judge vertical 🔝 the most important followed by horizontal plane (many directions) 🔛.

No matter how much you have in the end you would have had even more if you had started out with more.