Hanging Audio Rack?

So then, what is the best possible floor for a rack to sit on? Let's say we were designing from scratch. I've always found it hard to believe that a wood floor system with it's giant diaphram is good, and concrete retains too much energy. In the perfect world, what would your set-up look like from earth up and why?

That was exactly what I was wondering, would the school of light vs solid mass come to oppose each other. It seems to me idea one, solid mass would be very easy to achieve if your on the bottom floor with slab on grade or crawl space. I could see simply cutting out a portion of the floor, digging down a few feet and pouring concrete. I think this could be achieved in a very affordable fashion. This construction method of isolating a portion of a floor is used quite often in manufacturing. I would "being American and all" tend to see this as the proper direction, after all, everything eventually ends up sitting on the earth. The next step in this direction would be to incorporate the spring and isolation techniques used in earthquake design. In our case the spring size would be less than for a building. I would assume we could find someone who could determine the design of a spring isolation platform if anyone wanted to experiment.
I am however quite intrigued by Redkiwi line of thinking. What is the easiest way to create an extremely lightweight completely isolated system that has the most separation from the earth. Again, assuming a rack system is well spiked, what is the ultimate bearing to retain the benefits of the light weight system? Or is it adequate to simply have a rack sit anywhere as long as it's spiked? It seems to me that this is not the answer, so I'd love to hear ideas on this aproach.

O.K. Red, I'm following so far. The shelf of course we've discussed at length and I believe as you do that the Nueance is as good a solution as we've found so far. If we're acceptant of that statement, then the next issue is the interface between the shelf and the support. Again I feel very confident that you have provide some excellent recommendations on that topic. The next issue is the rack or base for the shelf. I'm personally at the point of wanting to investigate racks, construction methods, and design philosophy. I have gotten some good input from Caterham 1700 off site and hope some of the products he's trying work out. In the mean time I was thinking of trying some D.I.Y. systems just to get more in tune with the issues. The first question that comes to mind for me is material. I wonder if steal is the best material to use or is it just used because that's what was used in the past? Is brass, aluminum, graphite, or whatever a better choice? I realize the difficulties of working with aluminum or graphite vs the ease of steal, but have the other options been explored? I was also wondering if welded is the best solution vs, bolting with isolation between each member. Any thought on these ideas?

I love your post 90493m, I've copied it to my hard drive for future reference. You have some very creative approaches to isolation and I may need to play with some of them this year. Thanks for the thoughts, J.D.