@n80- I guess you can ’stack’ equipment, but I always thought that was bad practice for a variety of reasons- heat, interference among components, etc. And your amp, though on wooden strips, is still cushioned by the carpeting- better, I think to spike through the carpet to the underlying floor boards using some kind of spike and constrained layer platform. (All that means is that the materials of the platform have different resonance characteristics, with some sort of elastic compound in the middle, so you are not hearing the sound of one particular material). You can actually make some of this stuff yourself if you are resourceful.
Some people like the sound of certain kinds of wood. You can read about people’s impressions of the sound of various materials simply by searching --maple or butcher block or acrylic, etc.
You don’t necessarily need specialty equipment stands. But the furniture you use to support the equipment will impart a character to the sound-- there was a school of thought with the old Linn turntable about using a very light, flimsy table beneath it. Others like massive pieces-- I used to use a huge old mahogany prayer table to support a 250 lb turntable. It required some sorbothane under the feet of the table itself, not under the gear. The gear sat on top of the prayer table without additional isolation or other material (except for the turntable, which was a special case).
Putting sorbothane under a piece of gear will change the sound. It may be better or not. Certainly cheap enough to experiment with, and you don’t necessarily have to buy the audiophlle branded products to do this. Read up a bit on the difference between coupling and decoupling--I experimented 5 or so years ago, maybe longer, with a bunch of different ’footers’ beneath the power supply to my phono preamp. From an old audiophile expensive cone -the Goldmund, to Herbies footers, to Aurios (don’t remember the model it was like an enclosed roller block so the equipment would shimmy sideways), to some HRS stuff, to Vibrapods (puck and cone) to Stillpoints SS. Believe it or not, the Vibrapod with cone was pretty decent in that particular set up and dirt cheap; the Aurios lent unbelievable clarity but created a strident edge to the sound; the Herbies sounded ’mushy’ to me; the Goldmunds didn’t seem to do much at all. I found the Stillpoints to give me the clarity without the drawbacks of the Aurios. They are money, though.
Hope that helps.
PS: probably not a bad idea to get Jim Smith's book, Get Better Sound. You can order it from Amazon. Even if some of it is known to you, I'll bet you'll learn a few things. Jim's thing is all about 'set-up' and 'playing the room.' That goes beyond your questions-- namely how to 'voice' the system and take advantage of the room, acoustically. But, Jim gets down into all the details of system set up in the process. Well worth reading.
