Hi End rack really deliver?

The Adona racks look great, the shelves are adjustable, and are very solid. I use the "Monster" rack myself that has 4 shelves. A good rack is essential for good music reproduction.

Solid construction & heavy weight does not translate to better sound, unfortunately.

As Frank pointed out, I also own a 300lb granite that is used in multi-million dollar semiconductor equipment. For those who knows, it's for reticle inspection. Like wafer inspection, to resolve that 20nm geometry vibration has to be well controlled. In typical wafer inspection system, regardless bright field or dark field, chuck that holds the wafer will sit on a massive slab of granite which is suspended by air table. But to completely eliminate vibration introduced by the stage which moves the chuck, active damping is required to compensate the force exerted from the stage.

So in theory, one can build an active vibration control rack by reading in the sound, reverse the phase like noise cancellation headphone, and counter the vibrating transmitted thru air and floor with active device. It will probably cost half million to build such rack, maybe with all the insane audiophile on earth we can volume productize it and lower the cost to $100k. But when your system cost fraction of that amount, it does not make economic sense.

Grand Prix Audio designer was a race car chassis designer (Swift engineering who dominated CART in the early 90's). He knows the drawback fighting vibration only with mass, so he came up with something more creative, a combination of geometry, material, and assembly. Go read his white paper, I don't believe you can buy a more advance rack for less money.

Agree with Ejlif and others - Grand Prix Monaco modular racks and amp stands are expensive, but definitely worth it!

For those of you with GPA racks, have you ried filling the legs? I have Star Sound steel bearings that are thinner than human hair in the amp stand and are uniform in size that allow them to fit together better than sand/lead shot.

Yes, in fact, when done right I would attest that a true performance-oriented racking system could quite possibly be the most cherished component in a given system regardless of the other components one may own or how much one may have spent. Most cherished from a performance perspective that is.

-IMO