Regards to the Rack

Without a doubt. You should put the same effort in choosing the right stand for your system as you would any other component. Very nice system!

I have two different racks, a Polycrystal, and a Deluxe Room Tunes and I prefer the Room Tunes rack. I can't justify the price of the Finite Element rack but it was judged best by Hi Fi+. I'm considering a Mapleshade rack but will probably order an amp stand first to check the sonics with a couple different components and see what their cherry stain finish looks like in person. The Mapleshade looks like an extremely well built rack and the price is reasonable.

Another piece of audio insanity: what physical property is addressed by a rack? There is no known effect on transistor equipment of the vibrations in the room, either from footfalls or from the speakers. In room acoustics is a very important factor and, when it comes to racks, I feel that the size and location are the two things to look out for. If it wasn't for the religious aspect of high-end audio, and the fact the equipment rack has to be reminiscent of an altar, these crazily expensive racks wouldn’t exist. I think the equipment should be in another room, away from the speakers, on anything that will hold it up securely. Lack tables from Ikea are less than twenty bucks a piece. Buy records with the money you save.

I've gone a similar route, investing several $Ks in a Grand Prix Audio Monaco rack. Very well worth it and the improvement was evident in back to back comparisons with Finite Elemente Pagoda, let alone what I previsouly had my components mounted on.

Same here. Didn't think too much of it at first. I had the Solidsteel and bunch of Lovan Sovereign shelves which I thought should be good enough isolating the vibration. Last year, a friend bought some Grand Prix Audio rack and amp stands. We moved his BAT tube amp from a piece of 300 lbs slab (that used to sit underneath a laser in his company's lab) to this light-weight stand. Lo and behold, the four of us could not believe we actually heard a difference. It really buffled me because the Grand Prix was made of steel and carbon fiber. I can easily lift the amp stand with three fingers. But the differences were there.

I've since invested in some nice rack and stands from SolidTech (from Sweden) with some good results. Come to think about it, it makes good sense. A company I used to work with in the high tech industry invested a lot of money on vibration control tables for all their sensitve equipments like lasers. SolidTech's website has published white papers on how their products minimizes vibration.

FrankC