Arrangement of components on rack

I brought some of this up on the Facebook Tekton Owners Group. One guy, he took three pieces of scrap wood each about 3x5x1/4" and put them together in a triangle, like the way you would build a house of cards. He put a rubber band around the two upright sides, so it looked like an "A" with the speaker cable going through the hole at the top of the "A". Looked really dumb until you realized he just made a perfect cable elevator with rubber band isolation. The cable floated perfectly on the rubber band. Said it worked great.  

This is what I mean about being creative and making do with whatever is readily available and on hand. That way if it doesn’t work you are out nothing but a little time. But if it does work then you got something for nothing, and all you have to do now is figure out how to make it look better. Along the way you get to hear and learn what does what. Repeat this process a hundred times or so, you too will know your stuff. ;)

The arrangement of my components is the consequence of my thinking in terms of the signal path and it’s inter-connect terminations.

I’m a firm believer in the notion of tonearms being wired in the single-shot fashion: single uninterrupted runs of wire from the cartridge clips to the RCA jacks that plug into the RIAA phono stage. The phono cartridge/pick-up (the British term for cartridges) output is of the lowest level in the entire hi-fi chain, low output cartridges producing only 0.2mV or less!. The last place you want avoidable breaks in the signal path is in that of a cartridge on it’s way to being amplified by the phono amp.

The most common way tonearms are designed and built is with their internal wires terminated on RCA jacks (NOT plugs), with a required interconnect plugged into those jacks, the other end into the phono amp. That’s great in terms of ergonomics, but less than optimal in terms of signal degradation.

However, not terminating the arm’s internal wiring into RCA jacks requires the arm’s external wires be long enough to reach the phono amp, yet also as short as possible. Designers who make their arms with single-shot wiring like to keep the external wiring to no longer than 1/2 meter, 1 meter tops. They often then add shielding to the wire, which is a whole ’nother discussion!

With an arm having a very short length of external wire, the phono amp must then be placed very close to the turntable. I actually place my phono amp directly behind my table, with that amp’s rear side facing the back side of the table (and therefore the listener). Not pretty, but which do you prioritize: Looks, or sound quality?

The output of the phono stage is much more robust, fully the equal of most other sources. How long can be the inter-connect between line stage and power amp(s) is a function of: 1- the output impedance of the line stage; 2- the input impedance of the power amp; 3-the electrical characteristics of the inter-connects; and 4- how much you want to spend. ;-)

I try to separate the source components from the amplifier as far as possible so turntable on the top and amplifier on the bottom with the sources and preamplifier in the middle of the rack making sure to keep a good distance between components and keep the wiring neat and tidy away from the wall with air to breathe around the connections and other wires to avoid noise and ground loops.

Amps like ventilation so should be on top? That sounds good, except amps are heavy so I put them on the bottom of the rack for stability and to make sure the rack isn’t top heavy. And the speaker cables go directly to the speakers without having to pass through the rack.

On top of the amps I then have an Audioquest Niagara and the preamp above that along with various components. 

I try to keep the power cords on one side of the rack and everything else on the other.

YMMV - Good Luck