Where do you have your rack?

The reason for not placing your rack between the speakers has much more to do with sound than convenience. I get the impression your long interconnects are not as good as your other interconnects. It might be time to upgrade your long interconnect for proper evaluation of your rack placement. I noticed from your system photos you are set up in front of your fireplace. A quick and easy improvement is to close off the openings to your fireplace. Those openings create an echo that will severely mess with your sound.

A few things:

Dorkwad (great alias): it did improve, but my room had so many problems when I made the move that I have now addressed that I'm not entirely sure of the impact. My only real beef is the loss of flexibility and the requirement for a number of long cables (either speaker or interconnect) that can be expensive. I recently renovated this room after a lot of damage which has made the single biggest impact yet. I'll post pictures.

Rrog: I think you are right--it might be time to look at replacing the longer interconnects. At 4m+ they get expensive fast. I do have an absorption panel that I put in front of the fireplace when I'm listening for longer periods of time. It has a huge impact.

Tim

Have a look at my system on 'Done for now'.

I spent a long time moving everything around to optimise the sound. Without a doubt, moving the rack to a side wall makes a tremendous improvement to soundstage, imaging and resolution. I had a 50" plasma and AV rack between my speakers at one time and was amazed at the improvement once I seperated the hi fi and AV systems and moved the AV to another room.

My interconnects are 3m long and the speaker cables are 3.6m.

Steve

Steve:

It looks like we are dealing with a lot of the same dynamics. I just posted a picture of my renovated room, but yours have given me some ideas (I'm not sure why I still want the amps between the two speakers--seems like I could have my amps anywhere). I have been slowly adding (bulky) room treatments. I like the look of your treatments.

I think I'll keep my rack where it is. Focus on other things.

Tim

Tim, Can I make a recommendation? Your room is not balanced. The left side has bookcases with plenty of diffraction and the right has uncovered windows (reflective). Remove the room treatment and install some window coverings to try to get some kind of balance.