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Re: floating a rack w/ roller devices

Posted by pburant (A) on December 16, 2004 at 06:21:22

In Reply to: floating a rack w/ roller devices posted by rhyno on December 16, 2004 at 06:04:46:

A few things to think about:

If you put the rack on rollers, you won't be able to implement horizontal isolation devices under each component (you generally do not want more than one suspension system working in the same vector for any piece of gear). If you instead implement horizontal isolation beneath each component, you isolate the components from one another as well as the rack. Isolating only the rack from the floor leaves you with the problem of isolating each component from one another and from the rack (even a rack on rollers will still be subject to horizontal vibration, just to a lesser degree than without isolation).

On the flipside, putting the rack on rollers is less expensive than putting each component on rollers, and would certainly be better than no rollers in the system. It may be a good shortcut to better sound.

Back to another con: if you've ever played around with a component and rollers, you probably know that it's not always easy to place the component on the rollers such that each ball is in it's resting position when the component is lwered onto them. In addition to this, the cables from just one component can exert enough force on a component to compromise the effectiveness of the rollers, and this would only be a bigger problem with a full rack of equipment.

In my system, I have all my components on rollers and constrained-layer platforms (the rollers are between the platforms and the components, and the platforms are spiked to a shelfless rack - if I were to do it again, I'd probably opt to put the rollers between the rack and platform, and rigidly couple the components to the platforms). When I added a large sandbox under my rack, I got a nice improvement in sound (the difference wasn't huge, indicating that the rollers/platforms are doing a reasonable job of isolation).

-Pete

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