How important is a good rack?

Once you reach the threshold of isolation sufficient to keep your TT (or CDP) from skipping with light room vibrations, I wonder.

I don't have to wonder, I know.

I've tried many rack and isolation systems beneath many phono rigs. A rack affects more than skipping. It also has a major influence on sonics. Preventing skipping is only the minimum level of acceptable performance. It's like riding a bicycle... learning not to fall over is essential, but it's hardly the last word in performance.

A phono playback system is designed to detect extremely tiny physical vibrations, convert them to electrical signal, then amplify the signal by ~8-12,000 times.

Any vibration magnified by thousands becomes audible. This includes both vibrations induced by groove modulations (aka, music) and vibrations coming from all other sources (aka, noise). A phono cartridge can't tell one from the other. It picks them all up equally and the phono system amplifies them all equally.

GI/GO... and a vibration-prone rack sends a lot of GI.

+1 to Svkelleher's post

Salamander Synergy is well engineered, sturdily built, usefully modular and pretty good looking. But it's not an audiophile rack in that it makes little effort to control or diminish vibrations. That said, its modularity allows for quite a bit of tweaking, e.g., use of other footers for both the rack and the equipment on it, addition of isolation devices, etc. For not much money it can be made to sound notably better than it does OOTB.

And the other thing too. ;-)