How important is a good rack?

+1 to Svkelleher's post

Salamander Synergy is well engineered, sturdily built, usefully modular and pretty good looking. But it's not an audiophile rack in that it makes little effort to control or diminish vibrations. That said, its modularity allows for quite a bit of tweaking, e.g., use of other footers for both the rack and the equipment on it, addition of isolation devices, etc. For not much money it can be made to sound notably better than it does OOTB.

And the other thing too. ;-)

Thanks Dougdeacon, that's helpful; I can certainly see why racking matters for turntables.

I'd be very interested to hear accounts of people doing serious ABs comparing a "merely competent" rack (say like my homebrew rod and block) with a SOTA rack, say like a Finite Elemente, which costs 10 times more.

What I was wondering about whether investment in racking yields cost commensurate improvements comparable to other elements in the chain, once the fairly modest "threshold" I suggest has been reached. My speculation is that for many of us, the money might be more noticeably placed elsewhere.

Best,

John

While the theory that a component such as a turntable is better low rather than high, the top shelf is probably easier to play records.
To solve this issue, I simply "attached" the top of my rack to wall studs. I can't budge my rack in any direction no matter how hard I try.
I'm sure many can be done in a somewhat similar way if you just give it some thought.

I am going to put my table on a wall shelf and amp and dac on butcher blocks on the floor, just get rid of rack all together.

Very good and effective plan.