SEEKING SUPPORT
It would be a mistake to assume that the cabinet housing your system will not impact on the its performance – it does. Yet it is getting harder to find a good Hi-Fi rack these days. Thankfully we have come across two excellent examples recently.
Avid’s Isorak (pictured right) is a high quality support solution for your audio components. This entirely modular, scalable and simply superb system can easily be tailored specifically to your own requirements thanks to the custom leg lengths available, and can be added to as your system changes or expands!
Isorak has thick solid shelves with resonance diffusion slots, supported by solid aluminium support poles with Isorak’s unique ball contact steelbearing separation points, further enhancing isolation characteristics. Cable management is included, and it all comes in a useful (and easy to assemble!) flat-pack design.
Purchased individually, the shelf tiers then simply stack onto each other above the base section. Five different lengths of leg are available, and this enables the system to be configured to match virtually any combination of hi-fi components, and also to adapt as your system changes. Isoraks can also be configured with either three or four legs for maximum flexibility. Each shelf is precision machined in black 30mm MDF, which is profiled to dissipate vibrations and prevent standing waves from forming.
Avid’s Isorak is available in two different shelf sizes and pricing starts at $765 per tier for Isorak mini (above) and $869 per tier for the full sized Isorak.
The other rack is the Evoque series from British company Atacama (below).
The Evoque concept is simple – you start with a base module and then add the necessary shelves to that. The shelves come in 145mm/195mm or 245mm internal space sizes, and can be stacked to a total height of 1255mm. All pieces sell for $549. There is also a double-width version (internal storage width 1120mm) which operates on the same principle, with the difference being that the individual pieces sell for $929 each.
Atacama recently stated that their goal in the production of a new stand was to “to build a hi-fi support able to dampen, direct, isolate and control sonic and mechanical resonance away from the equipment”.
When WHAT HI-FI? did a review of the Evoque their comment was “If you’re of the opinion all hi-fi racks are created more or less equal, the Atacama Evoque is about to make you rethink your position.” While on the subject (or soapbox) of support, I have on occasion come under criticism for suggesting that speaker stands used under bookshelf speakers can make a bigger difference to performance than the speaker cables used. The difference between an average speaker stand and a quality one is obvious and immediate, and is always an improvement, rather than the subjective changes (i.e. it sounds different) that you can get with cables.
A great example of this was the B&W Maserati 805 loudspeaker. Besides the cosmetics, which turned the 805s into one of the most gorgeous-looking loudspeakers ever produced, the only change to the speakers was the stand. Yet the Maserati 805s sounded considerably superior to the standard version.