The put up 2023 Editors’ Choice: Equipment Racks appeared first on The Absolute Sound.
Tag Archives: Equipment racks and stands
The following is a press launch issued by Carbide Audio.
March, 2023 – Carbide Audio introduces the brand new Evo replace to the Carbide Base audio tools footer. Far from a easy evolution, each half aside from the inner ViscoRing was redesigned to additional improve vibration management efficiency.
A brand new austenitic (i.e. non-magnetic) stainless-steel part was inserted into the highest middle of the footer. A ridge lining the perimeter of the highest part improves coupling by way of a discount in touch floor space, higher permitting for the passage of low amplitude vibrations into the system to be dissipated as warmth.
Twice as many viscoelastic parts are actually utilized within the decrease ball bearing isolation stage to additional enhance horizontal damping. The zirconia ball bearings utilized within the decrease part are 50% bigger in diameter. This reduces rolling resistance to higher permit small horizontal footer actions in response to low amplitude vibrations – a vital element for isolation of micro vibrations.
The patent pending design of the higher housing has additionally been up to date to offer higher isolation efficiency when supporting tools on the light-weight finish of the load vary for a given ViscoRing
.
Collectively the updates measurably enhance efficiency, most notably within the excessive frequencies.
The new Evo model of Carbide Base is on the market now for $299 USD every instantly from https://carbide.audio or from our community of distributors.
The submit Carbide Audio Introduces Carbide Base Evo Audio Footer appeared first on The Absolute Sound.
The following is a press launch issued by Carbide Audio.
March, 2023 – Carbide Audio introduces the brand new Evo replace to the Carbide Base audio gear footer. Far from a easy evolution, each half apart from the interior ViscoRing was redesigned to additional improve vibration management efficiency.
A brand new austenitic (i.e. non-magnetic) stainless-steel part was inserted into the highest heart of the footer. A ridge lining the perimeter of the highest part improves coupling by a discount in touch floor space, higher permitting for the passage of low amplitude vibrations into the system to be dissipated as warmth.
Twice as many viscoelastic components are actually utilized within the decrease ball bearing isolation stage to additional enhance horizontal damping. The zirconia ball bearings utilized within the decrease part are 50% bigger in diameter. This reduces rolling resistance to raised permit small horizontal footer actions in response to low amplitude vibrations – a crucial element for isolation of micro vibrations.
The patent pending design of the higher housing has additionally been up to date to supply higher isolation efficiency when supporting gear on the light-weight finish of the burden vary for a given ViscoRing.
Collectively the updates measurably enhance efficiency, most notably within the excessive frequencies.
The new Evo model of Carbide Base is obtainable now for $299 USD every immediately from https://carbide.audio or from our community of distributors.
The put up Carbide Audio Introduces Carbide Base Evo Audio Footer appeared first on The Absolute Sound.
You would guess that an equipment rack from a company called ‘Solidsteel’ isn’t going to be the lightest of things, but this elegant four-tier – comprising (as the name suggests) solid stainless-steel hardware coupled with nicely made MDF shelves in a range of finishes – is an absolute unit. No weight is given by Solidsteel for the HF-4. but the word you’re looking for is ‘substantial’.
The spikes of doom!
HF-4 is part of the Italian furniture maker’s top ‘Hyperspike’ range, so called because the uprights for each platform end in a spike, which sits in a dimple in the upright of the platform below; at the bottom, there are four powerful-looking spikes that will either pierce deep into your floor or – more likely – rest on four provided metal cupped feet.
Part of the reason for the Solidsteel HF-4’s high mass has nothing to do with steel; it’s those MDF shelves and the fact they are 30mm thick. That not only puts the shelves into the ‘bloody heavy’ class but unless you have one of those half turntable/half cement mixer record players that costs the equivalent of the GDP of a small South American country, the HF-4 can take it.
Solidsteel claims the HF-4 can take up to 80kg per shelf, not only in that bottom shelf with its power-amp friendly 305mm height, but in the two 205mm high ones and the top shelf too. However, if you are deciding to max-out the weight of the HF-4, bear in mind that 320kg of electronics and a dozen or more kilos of stand sitting on four armour-piercing spikes is going to be ‘fun’ on some ancient rickety floorboards.
Confidence inspiring
What the HF-4 does however is ‘inspire confidence’. Set and levelled, this rack is going nowhere and your spiffy, cost-as-much-as-a-Merc turntable, streamer, pre or power amp is in exceptionally safe hands as a result. That holds as much sonically as it does physically because the platform makes products sound so well controlled. You don’t realise how much a stand influences the sound until you hear ones that don’t, and this one just lets your equipment sound as it was supposed to.
Yes, its high mass means deeper bass, but it also means no zings or stings as you move up the frequency range and as you turn the volume up or down. Nothing is indistinct or thrown into sharp focus and each aspect of a component’s performance was presented honestly and accurately. It was like you were listening to the device with fewer things in the way.
Finally, and this might seem an odd choice to end with, but it makes a perfect jumping off point for any accessory feet, cones or pods. The platforms are adding and subtracting so little to the sound that it gives any such feet the perfect neutral starting place. Of course, paradoxically, that neutral starting place likely means you won’t need such cones, spikes or pods anyway.
Solidsteel has long been the choice of audio manufacturers at shows and demonstrations worldwide to show off their products in as neutral a way as possible, for good reason. The secret’s out now, though. If you want your equipment to sound as unaffected by its support as possible, seek out the HF-4.
Price and contact details
- Solidsteel HF-4 stand £3,125
Manufacturer
Solidsteel
UK distributor
MIAN Audio Distribution
+(0)1223 782474
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Critical Mass Systems’ Joe Lavrencik has been designing and fabricating various types of vibration-control devices for many years now. (I can remember hearing his first stand-alone boxes almost two decades ago.) He is a serious inventor, and each new generation of his products has been more effective than the last, culminating in the massive, handsome-looking, and pricey Olympus and MAXXUM stands and platforms, which do precisely what they’re intended to do—kill the effects of airborne, floorborne, and self-generated vibration via constrained-layer damping without any major sonic trade-offs.
This has not always been the case with Joe’s gear—and with vibration-control systems in general. His initial CMS offerings, for instance, lowered background noise and smoothed out jittery frequency response quite effectively, but they also took a toll in dynamic life, rather in the same way that plugging power amplifiers into older-gen power conditioners killed dynamics. Similar compromises affected Joe’s smaller devices, particularly his cylindrical CenterStage audio feet, which replace factory-installed footers beneath electronic components.
Though intended to do precisely the same job that CMS’ latest platforms and stands do so successfully—reduce vibration-induced noises via constrained-layer damping—to my ear the first-gen CenterStages didn’t really do much of anything, save slightly deaden the sound. While other folks heard their effect more positively, I ended up thinking there wasn’t enough “there” there to justify the CenterStages’ not-insubstantial cost.
As he did with his equipment stands, Joe kept tinkering, and his later-gen CenterStage2, introduced several years ago, was, indeed, more effective, audibly smoothing out frequency response and slightly enriching timbre with less of a price in liveliness. Though I liked CenterStage2’s a good deal better than Joe’s earlier versions, I still didn’t like their effects well enough to keep sets of them in place under my electronics.
Comes now an even-newer generation of CenterStage footer, the CenterStage2M, and though I don’t really know what has changed in its design and construction (in a note to me, Joe’s explanation of what he’d done was rather too highfalutin and non-specific to be of much help), I gather from his website that the “sequencing” and “proportioning” of the materials used in the CenterStage2M have changed. In addition, “damping” has been added “in the very last stage in an amount that would eliminate the internal noise of the product and the component without rolling off the top end of the acoustic envelope.”
Whatever he has done, to my ear Joe has finally and fully succeeded. The CenterStage2M is an unqualified triumph. The differences it makes under any and all components are unmistakable and entirely for the better. Available in three progressively larger, taller, and more effective versions, CenterStage2M’s do three things that I really like: reduce noise, increase density of timbre (particularly in the bass and lower midrange), and improve clarity. Just as important is what they don’t do, which is markedly soften or roll-off the treble, blunt transients, constrain dynamic range, or reduce dimensionality.
I’ll give you one example, which can stand in for all the components I’ve used a quartet of the CenterStage2M’s with. You wouldn’t think (or, at least, I wouldn’t have thought) that footers would have a profound effect on the sonics of a world-class tape deck such as the Metaxas & Sins Tourbillon T-RX (which, along with the United Home Audio SuperDeck, was already the most lifelike source component I’d ever heard). But you’d (and I’d) be wrong.
Of course, a tape deck does add vibration in a way that static electronic components don’t. It has two large moving parts—ten-inch reels—that can wobble a bit in motion, thanks to the slight unevenness of NAB hubs. This constant, low-level vibration is transmitted through the entire deck (and into whatever it is sitting on), which is why studio decks are often built-into massive stands. Sticking four CenterStage2M’s under the U-shaped bracket and cylindrical “feet” of the Tourbillon seemed more like a re- cipe for instability than for lower noise and better sound, but it turned out to be a sonic wonderment. Indeed, the size and quality of the improvement startled me.
Tone color, which was already outstanding, suddenly became richer and more natural, particularly in the midbass and lower midrange (which weren’t thin to begin with). Understand that this was not a “lumping up” of energy (as with the port effect of certain speakers); it was just a more lifelike fullness that not only added density to timbre but focus and dimensionality to the instruments producing that timbre. In addition, transient detail seemed to “stand out” with greater clarity, as if traces of background noise had been washed away like chalk marks sponged off a blackboard. The net result was an unmistakable increase in neutrality and completeness, and hence in the magical illusion of real instruments and instrumentalists playing (near visibly) in a real space.
Where I couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend previous iterations of CenterStages, the CenterStage2M’s are a different matter. I can and do recommend them for use under all components, as their upside is now substantial and their downside indetectable. Let me warn you in advance that these little cylindrical devices aren’t cheap. If I knew what was inside them, I might be able to say that their material construction justifies their cost. But I don’t, so I can’t. What I can say, however, is that their sonic benefits make them worth their price.
Specs & Pricing
Price: CenterStage2M 0.8″ (height), $280 each; CenterStage2M 1.0″ (height), $545 each; CenterStage2M 1.5″ (height), $795 each (sold in sets of four, with shims supplied)
CRITICAL MASS SYSTEMS
(630) 640-3814
[email protected]
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A couple of years ago, I reviewed Critical Mass Systems’ CenterStage2. These clever feet took the longest time to work their craft, often sounding awful for a few days before turning into something consistently remarkable. When the new CenterStage2M (hereafter referred to as ‘CS2M’) arrived, I mistakenly thought that perhaps the change would speed up the process of working with the product. I was wrong; you need to devote a week to 10 days of things sounding just plain ‘wrong’ before they go so very, very right.
Aside from the change to the name on the side of each foot, there are few clues as to what’s changed from the outside. Inside, things are different. In developing the original, it became clear that what applied to making electronics sound superb didn’t quite work so well for loudspeakers. Ultimately, where making gasket material down to one-thousandth inch tolerance was fine for electronics, the loudspeakers required tolerances an order of magnitude tighter… and when that sort of gasket tolerance was reapplied to the devices sitting under audio electronics, the improvement was so significant the CS2M was born.
Not so simple
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. I spoke to Joseph Lavrencik, the sharp-of-mind guy behind Critical Mass Systems. He suggested, “The original CS2 was finalised using an additive approach; keep adding material until there was enough grip to control the soundstage. CS2M was developed using a subtractive approach; remove material until images were solidly layered and musically accurate.” This proved not to be a subtle change, he says, adding, “Using this approach, we could move the centre image backwards and forwards in space until the detail was precisely correct relative to the size and ‘weight’ of the ancillary images across a broad spectrum of music.”
The essential operation of the original CS2 holds with the CS2M. They act to mitigate surface-borne vibration while cancelling out their potential to add noise. While they make things sound worse, the long wait is because – as Critical Mass Systems suggests – they transfer entropy out of the component itself. Once in a state of equilibrium, they stay that way, which brings me to my biggest problem with both the CS2 and CS2M; the impatient box-swappers of audio will seldom give themselves ten days grace to let the system deroogelate itself (no real terms exist for this process, so I knitted my own). And those with a high review churn rate will enjoy what the CS2M can do to an entire system about once or twice a year.
Well-built and honest
Here’s the deal. If you have a good system on a well-built equipment table and using ‘honest’ neutral cables, put the right-sized CS2M footers under one or more components, then wait a week to ten days to let them do their thing. If your system sports any tweaks, strip it back to basics before you try the CS2M. You probably won’t be able to spend a week to ten days without listening, so you might find your system moving between sounding focused and excellent and sounding like it sunk a bottle of port the night before and isn’t feeling too skippy right now. Anyone used to running in Naim amps will feel right at home here. After a few days, the amplitude of those good/bad oscillations begins to get smaller, and it now varies between how the system used to sound and how it will ultimately end up sounding.
And how it ends up sounding is very good indeed. The significant change is a considerably more holographic sound, coupled with a sense of balance and order, making the system seem less ‘untamed’ than the raw products. This is no small change; it’s like your electronics just took a very big step up in performance, and while it’s unlikely that someone is ever going to use a set of feet that cost more than the thing that sits on those feet, it works exceptionally well across the board. My go-to Primare I35 Prisma is a perfect example; partnering it with four 0.8 feet works out at about 1/3rd the amplifier cost. That might seem like a bitter pill to swallow, but if you try it, the level of improvement in soundstage space, refinement, and focus on the sound make it an easy choice. Of course, the better the system, the more elegant the sound and the wider the soundstage, but the improvement seems consistent from product to product, and those with more petite price tags can sometimes have a surprising amount to give.
Comparisons between old and new are inherently complicated here; you essentially need to listen to your system’s original sound and log that away for ten days before you compare it to the new feet. There is no provision for A-B swaps, especially as the product seems to hold its equilibrium for as long as a day after being removed from either set of feet. Nevertheless, despite the inherent hiatus, it’s clear that the CS2M does everything the CS2 does and does them better. Often a lot better. The sound has greater dimensionality and weight; it’s also even calmer than before.
Relax, refine and reflect
The oddest thing about the difference is how it makes you feel toward the music being played; both make your system more relaxing, but CS2M makes that a more reflective process. Music is a cerebral yet impassioned experience through both sets of feet, but where this was a ‘refinement’ process with CS2, it’s a ‘refinement and contemplative’ process. Beethoven has a calming, blood-pressure-lowering effect on me at the best of times, but the CS2M made me even less inclined to chew through the restraints.
Critical Mass Systems made something remarkable with the CenterStage2 an,d with the CenterStage2M, the bar gets raised further. ‘M’ takes your system to the Max!
Prices and Contact Details
- CenterStage2M 0.8 (20×38mm): £275 per foot
- CenterStage2M 1.0 (35×38mm): £525 per foot
- CenterStage2M 1.5 (38×51mm): £775 per foot
Manufacturer: Critical Mass Systems
UK Distributor: Select Audio
URL: selectaudio.co.uk
Tel: +44(0)1900 601954
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The following is a press release issued by HRS.
July 25, 2022 – We are pleased to announce the release of an entirely new HRS Audio Stand System. Introducing the Patent Pending EXR Audio Stand System!
This true-performance, cost-effective design, provides extensive system configuration flexibility and infinite modularity at a lower price point than any of our HRS Audio Stands. “The EXR is a very innovative, high-performance audio stand system design with unprecedented performance value, modularity, customization (size and configuration), and upgrade options. You can even convert from an EXR Audio Stand System to a SXR, SXR Signature, or SXRC Audio Stand model in the future while preserving a majority of original system purchase price.”
Key Features of the HRS EXR Audio Stand
- Space efficient design minimizes total frame height, which gives the EXR Audio System the most vertical component space designed by HRS
- System configuration can be expanded, revised, or upgraded at any time to preserve the value
- Innovative frame design increases rigidity and performance which becomes more evident as the frame increases in height
- Available in a black or silver anodized finish. On the silver EXR Audio Stand, the sides and the back of the shelf are a black finish.
- Custom sizes are available in 9.5”, 15”, 19”, 21”, 23”, and 25” width with any customer-specified depth, making this your most affordable stand for almost any component.
- Component spacing on the EXR Audio Stand is available in 6″, 8”, 10”, or 12″; as well as custom component spacing of 14″, 16″, and 18″
Component spacing can also be changed in the future to fit different component heights should your system needs change. Its asymmetrical 4-leg vertical support system increases frame stiffness and performance; compared to traditional 3 or 4-leg designs.
Any HRS Isolation Base models (E1, R3X, S3, and M3X2) can be loaded directly into the EXR Audio Stand at any or all shelf locations
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Energy control is a large part of reproducing music with audio equipment; every element of a circuit, chassis, cone or cabinet has a resonant frequency, a pitch at which it will vibrate to a greater extent than others. Designers use a wide variety of methods to minimise this because vibration in the hardware introduces distortion to the sound waves being produced. You can put virtually anything under a turntable for instance and it will probably change the sound quality, this is easy to understand because a turntable stylus is trying to measure very small vibrations in the vinyl groove. What’s harder to get your head around is that capacitors, resistors and chips are also affected by vibration, and it seems that no matter how much mass is used or how stiff the casework is, changing the support changes the sound.
Paweł Skulimowski is a Polish mechanical engineer and amateur drummer who has been making the Franc range of isolation products for over a decade now. He makes furniture, bases and feet and the latter are particularly professional in build and finish. According to the website, “He has discovered a technique of joining really hard and stiff ceramic materials together with light aluminium alloy and elastic plastics. All parts are precisely CNC machined to give great quality and consistency.”
There are two types of Ceramic Disc Isolator feet in the Franc catalogue; two models for electronics/turntables and two for loudspeakers, while the latter can also be placed under equipment racks. The least expensive is the Ceramic Disc TH which is sold in sets of three or four and stands just over 30mm high. The base is loose but does not come away and there is a proprietary and unspecified ceramic interface within. It has a hole in the top that would act as a spike receptor but the top plate is 44mm in diameter so accepts most sizes of component foot too.
The Ceramic Disc Classic stands 45mm high and is 68mm in diameter at its base and here the top cap is free floating and can be removed to reveal a ceramic ball in the middle of a carbon fibre spider. The top cap is covered in smooth plastic and is 46mm in diameter, the idea is that the base of the equipment rests on the foot directly, bypassing the equipment’s own feet. This foot is available in sets of three as standard, other quantities on request.
The two loudspeaker feet are defined by size, Slim and Fat, with the smaller model coming in at 25mm high by 59mm in diameter at its largest. These are shown to contain three ceramic balls within them and like the TH feet have a central spike locating point on top and a foam rubber skin on the base, they feel more damped than the equipment feet but there is a bit of movement in the top cap. The Fat Foot lives up to its name by standing 45mm high with a similar 68mm base to the Classic, again it has a central spike locator and rubber covered base.
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Some parts of your system that are somehow inherently less sexy than those big boxes or spinning platters – and chief amongst them is probably your rack. It’s not that what supports your equipment doesn’t matter or make a difference. I’d argue quite the opposite, with many an audiophile underestimating the importance of and under-investing in their system’s supports. It’s just that most of us simply want to make a one-time decision, preferably without spending too much time on it. Instead, we can get on with the serious business of listening to music whilst angst-ing about whether that new pre-amp you just read about would be the answer to all your system’s woes? Oddly enough, very few of us ever stop to consider that a decent rack might just answer a whole host of questions – but then I guess that’s my point.
Take that mindset a bit further, and it’s not hard to extrapolate an almost tick-box list of the desirable attributes required by any serious audio rack – before you even get to its sonic contribution. It needs to be sturdy enough to support increasingly heavy components (just in case we ever manage to afford those monster amps we really, really want). It needs to be adjustable/configurable (to make space for those monster amps we really, really want). It should be modular (just in case those monster amp are mono-blocs) and it should look good loaded with audio equipment. It’s incredible how many racks fail on this last criterion. They might look great when you see them empty but pack them with audio equipment, and they don’t look as good. The same applies to modularity and adjustability: changing stuff about in theory isn’t the same as actually doing it in practice. All too often it’s a case of fiddle and faff to get the thing put together and then leave well alone. I’ve often wondered whether the Quadraspire racks’ longevity owes as much to the fact that they work (in the mechanical sense) as it does to their sonic virtues.
Of course, the bigger and heavier the equipment you make, the more pressure it exerts on your support solution (literally and figuratively). So perhaps it should come as no surprise that those practised purveyors of hideously heavy amplifiers, Gryphon Audio Design, have finally turned their attention to creating a rack system capable of accommodating, well… those monster amps that we all really, really want. Nor perhaps should it be any surprise, given that the company seems to be on something of a new product roll right now, that the rack they’ve come up with doesn’t just tick all the boxes, it does it in bold after adding a few extra boxes of its own. When you build something like the Mephisto – an amplifier that would bring the average audio rack out in a cold, shivering sweat – it tends to help you focus on the priorities.
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Some products are called ‘dampers’ and in use have little to do with the term. Not here. Taken separately or in combination, Kuzma’s PLATIS equipment platform and the Damper Feet are truly damping down vibration, whether that’s from the environment trying to gain access to your most sensitive audio parts or keeping the vibration of components themselves in check.
PLATIS 54 (and larger PLATIS 65) are passive isolation platforms. They feature a base frame made from solid aluminium, which is supported by adjustable damping feet. The top supporting plate is made of a hard laminate, reinforced with solid aluminium (you can also just purchase the top plate on its own). The lower plate connects with supplied damping feet, and you can effectively ‘dial in’ or fine tune the amount of damping by the number of pods relative to the weight of the product sitting on the platform. There is some wiggle room here, but typically you need enough pod-ness to account for the weight but not so much as to over-damp the system. Given that the platform can handle up to 100kg (at which point you have gone to five pods per platform) it’s an extremely flexible option. I ended up using it mostly with three pods (not in the ‘three feet good, four feet bad’ mantra of the audio woomeisters; just that using it with heavier turntables and sources – such as the Gryphon Ethos tested in issue 191 – is the correct weight-range match).
Meanwhile the Damper isolation feet can be used under any audio component without the need for platforms in order to filter structural vibrations as well as also acting as noise filter suppressors for vibrations generated by the component itself.
It’s something like a large aluminium Oreo with top and bottom cups slotting into an aluminium hoop… but it’s what’s underneath that counts. The top and bottom cups are machined from a solid aluminium plate. These cups are separated with multi layered silicone and aluminium dampers and are said to filter vibrations up to as high as 3kHz. Dampers are simply positioned under any audio component, under the metal chassis itself, spike or under rubber feet. Some personal experimentation is recommended here.
They are sold in sets of three or four, and once again choice largely comes down to weight management. Each damper can cope with a load of up to 20kg so most electronics will only need a trio of Dampers. However, if an audio component has a skewed centre of gravity (such as having a heavy transformer on one side of the case, reposition dampers accordingly and in extreme cases you might need to think about using four dampers in place of three (sonically speaking, use three and reposition unless that is absolutely impossible). There is no levelling adjustment in these Dampers, although the cup has a rubber ring inserted to minimise slipping and this can be removed.
For higher loads just add more dampers. This might seem like over-egging the pudding, but as they are intended to be used universally across audio, it’s conceivable that you might end up putting them under some 100kg or more power amps or loudspeakers, and you might conceivably end up with five or more Dampers spread evenly across the base of your product. Just remember that in most cases there’s no point in adding just one more damper for the sake of it, as their performance is so effective that could undermine the whole exercise.
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