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The Lack rack is really good. It's made a positive, clearly audible difference. Here's the long story...My previous rack was nothing special (MDF shelves with large diameter steel support cylinders between shelves), but it was very solid and heavy.
I "added" to it by setting it up on hockey puck sandwichs (two practice-weight hockey pucks with a blu-tack "filling" under each corner leg), and setting-up each individual component with its own combination of cones, vibrapods, or a vibrapod sandwich shelf on top of the MDF (Vibrapods under transport, Vibrapod/glass shelf/point down Vibracones under DAC, point down Vibracones under preamp, Vibrapod/glass shelf/Vibrapod under amp).
The individual component set-ups were arrived at over a few years of trying different things (wood, metal cones, sorbothane isolation feet, etc.) and I thought things were decent enough. My stereo's never sounded horrible; actually I've always thought it sounds pretty good - except for what I thought was a very identifiable difference in smoothness (less) and treble hardness (more) compared to analog. But you know for tone, body, weight, and soundstaging I had no complaints.
My incentive for building a Lack rack was threefold: 1) I have turntable, phonostage, and tuner that I wanted to get on a proper rack; 2) I wanted the rack this equipment went on to match the rack my other stuff goes on; 3) the stereo is in the living room and I needed something better looking to satisfy the GF.
For appearance reasons only, I picked the black Lack. This turned out to be really frustrating because the legs are hollow. My long-term solution will be to replace the legs with spiked two inch diameter maple dowels, but for now the rack is set-up with the hollow legs and no bottom spikes - which is a very sub-optimal set-up that doesn't really follow the Ken Lyon recipe at all.
Be that as it may, even this sub-optimal set-up made a big, big sound difference.
The major differences being:
Smoother, much, much smoother. Pretty well analog smooth. All harshness gone. Didn't think digital could be so smooth. Amazing.
Way more detail. It was odd hearing this in combination with the smoother sound. This is to the extent of hearing small vocal and instrumental details, inflections, nuances, etc. that I hadn't really noticed before in recordings I've listened to hundreds of times.
Better soundstaging. No real effect on soundstage scale/size/depth/width... , but definitely an improvement in separation
A lot more "air". e.g. the studio or recording venue has become much more apparent in everything I listen to.
Better tone. Not a huge difference. Piano used to sound like piano (I used to hold qualifications for teaching piano so I'm familiar with the instrument), but it sounds more so now.
I have no idea how something like a Monaco Grand Prix or a Neuance rack (or any big-buck rack actually) sounds so I can't compare, but the semi-finished Lack rack has fixed all sorts of things I wanted to address with my system's sound. From what I understand, it's the Lack tabletop itself that's specifically well-suited to audio applications. So if you're experimenting with MDF, glass, wood, etc. shelving for a rack try out a Lack top too.
Anyway, for a 4-shelf rack (actually 5-shelves if following the Lyons recipe - there's a bottom base shelf that you dont' use for equipment) the cost (in Toronto) is CDN$20 per Lack end table = $100, about $10 for screws (for your spikes) and metal washers (to glue onto the table tops so the screwspikes can't slide-off the top), and $25 or so for an 8 ft length of 2" diameter maple dowel... about CDN$135 in total.
This is long-winded - I just wanted to share my great experience with this inexpensive, easy-to-do, good looking (definitely wife/GF acceptable) tweak.
Follow Ups:
Forget your Exotic NASA space age materials.
paper and cardboard is the best.
Until I can afford one of Ken's Neuance platforms, this sounds pretty good under the Linn!
that's funny. looks like a cat scratch pad. Which brings me to a problem I've just find with Lack rack... It's not all that stable and every morning I've found evidence of it being moved around by the cats jumping on it/sleeping on it at night.
the spikes because it is preferable to reduce the surface area of the coupling to each tabletop...otherwise you are transmitting unnecessary vibrations into each table.
But the point we are making is the honeycombe of cardboard doesnt couple that much at all. As the whole shooting match will flex with the vibrations and hence absorb it, thus the isolation is achived. think of it as a cardboard "2 shelf flexy rack".
Given the lack -pun not intended much :¬) of strength in the cut down version i think spikes might just phyically distort the base and the matrix in a bad way if the load is remotely heavy - but of course I might be wrong, I dare say given the nature of this place others will soon tell me so.
I have not tried a un-adulterated lack platform under me TT's with spikes, but it might work better (my SL2 s9ts on a 7 layer MDF composite of my own design and its rubber feet are very floaty anywhat. My Rega's in its box at the mo).
I might lop a corner off a trianglular lack oneday as this way it would fit the shelf, sorta reverse pink triangle stylie.
just trying to help Herb optimize the design, particularly since he said he is experiencing movement in levels.Here are quotes from Ken. Draw your own conclusion:
"use spike decoupling at the floor as well as at the support shelf interface [as this] presents a small surface area for airbourne intrusion/energising."
It really is a very different design from the flexy. In the flexy you have common vertical supports that transmit vibration vertically to each shelf.
The legs on the black Lack are hollow, which stumped for a while until I realized the interior measurement is just right for a 1 3/4" dowel to fit in.Then I started to waffle between just using some nice dowels - like nicely stained maple would look nice; but after seeing the black laminate legs in place I think they look good.
There is an added complication in that Ikea has recently decided to save maybe 2 cents per leg by not securing the screw into the leg with glue, so that once you screw a leg into the top, if you try to undo the leg, the screw stays in the top instead of coming out with the leg (the screws stay in the legs in my older Lacks).
This leaves you with a real pain of a job to take the screws out of the tops so I figure I'll just leave the Lack legs on - for the dowels it will be a simple slide in, mark off level with bottom of Lack leg, cut to correct length, and then set a spike in the bottom of the dowel as per the Lyon instructions.
What I've also done is glued down some metal washers on the table tops (Alene's Tacky Glue seems to hold them down really well while giving a good window for adjusting before the glue sets). When the legs are spiked the points will go into the donut hole area and (hopefully) the washers will prevent any disasters.
For now, the hollow leg walls fit around the washers and are prevented from sliding off the tops completey by the washers stopping them.
It would still be great to come up with some sort of way to keep the cats off. They are sneaky about it but I can't get rid of them.
Made from the plastic grill for fluorescent lights with golf tees hot glued on.Jim N
Hey Herb - we have five cats and they USED to get on the stereo rack.Using a squirt bottle to give a quick spritz if they get near the rack works wonders.
hi grailer, that used to work - until they started to get curious about the bath and gradually started to take baths at the same time as humans.
Great! Can you post a photo for those of us addicted to DIY?
definitely would, but too old fashioned to have digital camera or scanner - maybe I'll borrow girlfriend's to post some pics
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