Revised Stacking Order - Help Required

Easy cable dressing is probably key to your best (?) order.

Personally, I'd put the 300s on the bottom, but I've no idea if this would have any positive impact over your suggested order.

Have you tried the XPS-DR on the nDac rather than the non-DR one? It'd be interesting to see on which box it would have the biggest impact.

Hello,

I jump on this thread not to create a new one. Today I have 3 racks of 3 levels.

Stacking order is:

Bd player           CDS3        XPS

Nap V175          252          300ps

HC preamp       300         supercap

Do you think I could get benefit swapping Bdplayer and 252 in order to have both CDS3 and 252 on top shelves, knowing that BD is of 99% of the time?

Thanks

Getting the 252 out from being in the middle of everything will be good to improve clarity. I'd also consider swapping the 300-300ps around to move the large 300ps transformer farther away and not having it nested between other boxes; the 300 head unit also sounds better a level up for some reason and may help cable-dressing by allowing more freedom from the floor for interconnects.

My general advice is to place the larger transformer boxes as far away from the other boxes as your stacking allows. Then group the low-level signal handling boxes away from other big power supply boxes.

DB.

Thanks. So for you best arrangement would be:

CDS3                   252               XPS 

Nap V175           300                supercap         

HC preamp        Bd player     300ps

NAPV175 is continuously on and has serious transformer too. Won't that impact CDS3 performances? Maybe swaping NAPV175 and BDplayer on my top drawing would be better?

Since the SC is the only PS that transfer audio signals I decided it sould be at the top or bottom of the PS’s. A made a quick test and preferred bottom so that is what I have, not that it was night and day but I had to make decision...

Im not so familiar with nDac and NDX, does any of them require a connected power cord when used with an xps? In that case put it on the lowest shelf.

shawnforever posted:

Thanks. So for you best arrangement would be:

CDS3                   252               XPS 

Nap V175           300                supercap         

HC preamp        Bd player     300ps

NAPV175 is continuously on and has serious transformer too. Won't that impact CDS3 performances? Maybe swaping NAPV175 and BDplayer on my top drawing would be better?

Only experiment will reveal it, but what you say is worth a try. It depends on how noisy the player is - if it is relatively quiet then it will be a good move.

But try it and listen and decide if it is better or not. Some changes are immediately obviously better or worse and some only reveal themselves over several days when you find you are listening to more or different music or less; if the latter then reverse the change.

This is why I prefer to change one thing at a time and listen before moving to the next thing. I've learned most of my system improvements by accident when trying to tidy-up something and finding it was horrible afterwards then returning to how it started and the relief when the music returned - then puzzling over what has happened - experiment in careful increments...etc.

When it all seems to work together as one and the music has your interest and attention then that is usually a good place to stop playing with the arrangement at least for a few weeks and enjoy your music.

DB.