Equipment Rack Placement

highend audio shows are not exemplars for equipment placement. having helped in the setup and teardown of rooms at ces and stereophile shows, i can tell you that you must frequently use your space for display as much or more so than for optimum sound quality. when i took the equipment rack from betweem my speakers a few months ago and treated the back wall where it had stood with asc wall panels, i experienced an improvement in soundstage depth and width nearly as great as upgrading the speakers themselves. (i now have only my amp behind and between the speakers--i use 6 ft. cables and 21 ft. ic between amp and pre). it costs some for this setup but its well worth it.

Corn F.B. no doubt your set-up is best if room permits and exta IC cost not objectionable. However I think in practice not many audiophiles take the trouble to do it because you very rarely see 20ft ICs for sale at Audiogon.

sam: actually, it's fairly easy to find 6,7&8 meter pairs of ic's on audiogon. just post a "wanted" ad, specifying the wire you desire and, i can almost guarantee you, you'll get at least one response very quickly. BTW, the 2 best audio shop soundrooms i've visited in the past 30 days have setups much like mine (audio unlimited, in denver; goodwin's highend, in waltham, ma), as do a number of my friends. it is no more expesive to go in this direction than using multiple sets of 1 1/2 or 2 meter pairs of ic's, as many do. and it truly does render a HUGE improvement in soundstage/imaging.

As long as the rack isn't more than 2/3 as high as your soundstage, or speaker height, is what I've also heard. I can't say from experience since my rack is off to the left of the soundstage and the other times where I had the rack in between the speakers, it was a shorter rack (20"). However, I haven't experienced any audible of effects of rack placement period.

I just moved my audio rack from just behind the speakers to the left of my listening sofa. The sound definitely improved. I suspect it has to do with a reduction in vibration. My speakers have side firing woofers. Also, I have noticed that placing anything in between the speakers, even a foot or two behind the tweeters (a tv) degraded the imaging quite a bit. I have noticed this phenomena with three different speakers. I have read / heard two different and opposing viewpoints on wether speaker wire length or interconnect length should be longer. The manufacturer of my speaker cables, Nordost, recommended ideal ic length of 1 meter, and speaker cable of 12 meters. Their technician said I should not go over 2 meters for an ic, but going 5-6 meters on the speaker cables wouldn't make a difference. This makes sense given the much higher signal levels going over speaker cables. I have heard this same advice from my local dealer. Also, I notice that interconnect quality seems to affect the sound more than speaker cable quality.