Is it a shelf? Is it a damping plate? No – it’s the Acouplex ReFract
By Roy Gregory
Equipment support is one of the great black holes of audio endeavour. On the one hand, you’d think the basic proposition (a stack or set of shelves) should be easy enough to achieve: on the other, beyond actually simply accommodating/storing the equipment, what else does the supporting structure have to do/achieve? It’s a tragic juxtaposition. There are any number of variously ambitious support systems available – but at the end of the day, they’re all just furniture. If one (not to be underestimated) function of any equipment rack is to make the aesthetic muddle that constitutes most systems look – or at least seem – more neat, tidy and domestically acceptable, the “Not in my house!” response to the latest stack of slabs, wires and gantries (let alone air-pumps and gauges) carries the crack of doom. Nor does it necessarily emanate from the ‘other half’. Plenty of audiophiles don’t want to see their system looking like it should be stood offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. And that’s before we even get to questions like “Does it actually work?” or “What’s it trying to do?” This last question is particularly pertinent, ‘cos experience suggests that most support systems are only doing half the job – and those that at least address the other half probably aren’t being used effectively, in case the end result looks ‘dork-y’.
So before discussing how effective any support system is or how it works, we need to start by asking what it needs to do? Like a lot of the key questions in audio, it’s a question that rarely gets asked because everybody assumes that they already know the answer. Ask any group of assembled audio system owners whether they own a rack and the majority answer is likely to be yes. Ask them why and the response will likely run along the lines of, “To isolate my equipment.” The more enlightened might even include the qualifier, ‘mechanically’… But is that really what we are trying to do? Look at the SoundStrip BlackHole NoiseTraps I wrote about a week or so ago – https://gy8.eu/blog/the-soundstrip-blackhole-noisetrap/ . Here’s a device that acts to reduce mechanical influence on the sound of your system, succeeds to an astonishing degree, but it certainly doesn’t do it by ‘isolating’ anything! In point of fact, isolating equipment is of limited efficacy. What you need to isolate is the signal! That’s inside the equipment; equipment that itself generates mechanical energy!
So, if you are going to talk about ‘supporting’ audio equipment for best performance, then you need to consider more than just isolating it from energy reaching it through the floor. The list of goals to be target is actually much more complex than that. In (probable) order or priority – priorities that will vary with specific equipment and circumstances – they should read something like this:
- Drain the mechanical energy that’s generated inside the equipment itself.
- Prevent the equipment chassis attracting or storing energy.
- Isolate the equipment from energy arriving through the floor/walls or air.
Oh, and along the way, you need a solution that allows you to individually level each piece of equipment and (ideally) control its physical interface/mechanical ground path.
