Hi fi rack

                     ???? PROPOSAL ????

I have a wish,a suggestion....in my world,is the only reason to get a dedicated hifi rack,...to get better performance.

Why should I pay maybe between € 1000-4000:-, without knowing what the sound performance is for each rack.
Here you put a lot of suggestions,...However, how can we evaluate these proposals?

◾ Proposal: Most people are well aware of Naim Fraim.
Use that rack for reference, and grade your proposal against Naim Fraim.

????Naim Fraim,.. From 1 to 10 better than Fraim.
????Naim Fraim,.. From 1 to 10 inferior to Fraim.

Then you,we can get a small picture of how the  proposed racks delivers in performance.
As I did in my carrying test, graduated from 1 to 4.

It's completely uninteresting if it looks beautiful, or is good build-quality, if it doesn't deliver in sound performance.

/Peder ????

Drikus posted:

Richard Dane posted:

No CD Fraim here.  There was one at the factory (probably the one that's pictured on this thread).  It was made as one of a number of alternative promo Fraim related items. It was kind of fun but not very practical (surely any Naim owner would have way too many CDs) and would have been quite expensive.

This was just a concept to store cd's in a Fraim kinda way you mean? Did it go to production?

No, it was a one-off.  

Peder posted:

                     ???? PROPOSAL ????

I have a wish,a suggestion....in my world,is the only reason to get a dedicated hifi rack,...to get better performance.

Why should I pay maybe between € 1000-4000:-, without knowing what the sound performance is for each rack.
Here you put a lot of suggestions,...However, how can we evaluate these proposals?

◾ Proposal: Most people are well aware of Naim Fraim.
Use that rack for reference, and grade your proposal against Naim Fraim.

????Naim Fraim,.. From 1 to 10 better than Fraim.
????Naim Fraim,.. From 1 to 10 inferior to Fraim.

Then you,we can get a small picture of how the  proposed racks delivers in performance.
As I did in my carrying test, graduated from 1 to 4.

It's completely uninteresting if it looks beautiful, or is good build-quality, if it doesn't deliver in sound performance.

/Peder ????

SB posted:

DIY approach is an option. I am using A TNT audio "flexy" design. While I haven't compared it to commercial products, it looks and sounds great. 

Hi SB,as you can see and as I wrote in my post,I have an DIY TNT Flexy myself too.And,as you say,I don't really know how it could sound compared to Fraim,Quadraspire etc...that's why I want something new.

Regards

Drikus posted:

Fabio 1 posted:

I would like to thank each one of you for your replies.So many inputs so far!I just want to take my time now to get a decision.Of course I will let you know and probably will ask again.Thank you one more time.

Ciao

@ Peder,I'm from Italy.

Not far from the Milan Cathedral?

Drikus,I live in Milan.

Peder posted:

Fabio 1 posted:

@ Peder,I'm from Italy.

I suspected it ????.

I have actually run a lot of motorcycle (Gold Wing), in your country,...most in the northern part.
Love the area around Livingo, where I have been a lot.
Incredibly beautiful country.!

/Peder ????

Peder,nice to know you like Italy and Livigno.I like your country a lot.I had a girlfriend a very,very long time ago from Bromma,Stockholm,Lotta...

Fabio 1 posted:

Peder posted:

Fabio 1 posted:

@ Peder,I'm from Italy.

I suspected it ????.

I have actually run a lot of motorcycle (Gold Wing), in your country,...most in the northern part.
Love the area around Livingo, where I have been a lot.
Incredibly beautiful country.!

/Peder ????

Peder,nice to know you like Italy and Livigno.I like your country a lot.I had a girlfriend a very,very long time ago from Bromma,Stockholm,Lotta...

???? Fabio 1,...The world is smaller than you think ????, I have also been a lot in Bromma.
A friend who is a big Gold Wing trader lives there,...then we probably went on the same streets in Bromma you and I.

A funny story from your Italy......

We were 4 Gold Wings (8 people) who had been in former Yugoslavia,on the Pula Peninsula....near the city of Pula.
We drove the coastal road towards Rappallo on the Italian Riviera, a very beautiful road.
When we came to Rappallo, we went out to the small fishing village of Portofino (very famous and beautiful).

We parked our Gold Wings next to an old gray wood-garage in the port... it was very old and not beautiful.
Old slanted wooden doors.
When we stood there,..came an old man and went very slowly towards the garage....we thinks he was about 70-75 years old,and had a little hard to go.

He opened the garage doors and walked in, then we hear a big engine started,...and out rolls a red Ferrari Testarossa from this old ugly garage.

Whaoo,...the old man saw our surprise,and laughed at us ????.
A fun memory from Portofino,this was a long time ago...1985.

Then we saw lots of Ferrari's and Lamborghini's ect in Portofino and Rappallo.
You are building incredibly beautiful cars in Italy ❤.

After a few days,...we continued to drive the coast road to the French Riviera, and further to the coastal road to Barcelona,but that is another story.

Have you not been in Italy,... go there.

/Peder ????

Richard you should mention the AV Fraim. Wonderful engineering with pillars going through the shelves to support the centre channel.

The way to keep Mana in tune is to set it up on a board, then board on floor. You can then slide it and shift it and never goes out of tune

Audiophile Starbase here.

Dev B posted:

Richard you should mention the AV Fraim. Wonderful engineering with pillars going through the shelves to support the centre channel.

Hey Dev, I hope you and the family are all well.

Yes, the AV Fraim was rather lovely.  Now that was something many of us really wanted.  It would have been expensive though - probably too expensive at the time, but these days, who knows. I can't remember how many were made - a few only, I think. One lived in the small AV dem room at the factory for a while.  Paul S would know...

I ordered this from Custom Design

Fabio 1 

Congratulations on your purchase, it looks like a nice rack, it will be interesting to hear your thoughts once it’s all set up

Have one for my Muso, Tv, Blu-ray player etc. Very nicely made with nice chunks of real cherry wood, not veneer....and easy to set up.

my 2p worth ...... I happened across a redundant 4x shelf Quadraspire x - reference , at 50% , so was just V.expensive £2k rather than £4k OMG how much.

I then sold off the 2 level Fraim, I already had to part fund it...only have two boxes n272/555 the 3rd level holds the AV kit ....I have a spare level waiting for something, Core?

SQ Difference between to good racks Fraim & x-ref was of course not night & day (TBH the recent 4.6 update to the N272 was a bigger change), bass was the main benefit and generally an improvement in solidity and musicality . 
More importantly SHMBO likes the look, and it suits our living room environment with the Satin black ATC 40A speakers more than the Ash fraim.
Like the Fraim beautifully made, the brass parts in particular are very nice indeed.  several visitors have been intrigued by it.

It seems largely dust resistant which is good

I use the Atacama Evoque SE really good build and in my system really made a difference. The shelves are that flat my NDS sits perfectly flat on its 4 metal feet.

I posed the following a couple of years ago, but no-one offered any answers...

It seems to have become common practice with equipment racks to have the rack shelf, then an additional shelf/board on top of it, on point contacts (domes etc), with the equipment sitting on that, while the equipment commonly has some form of elastomeric feet of its own.

Can anyone explain the logic of the extra board, and how it supposedly improves sound quality?

I ask because it seems to me that the extra board will create an additional 'sounding board' that will be excited by incident sound, causing vibrations at the board's resonant frequencies and thus potentially degrading sound quality unless the equipment feet provide adequate damping isolation or damping (in which case why bother in the first place?)

Surely a better approach would be either:

i) At the very least make the second shelf/board heavily damped (e.g. by adherent damping pads or coating along the lines of 'dedshete').

Ii) Rather than an extra shelf/board near to the size of a rack shelf, use small plates (whether glass, stone wood, round, square or triangular) just 2-3 inches across, under each equipment foot, each positioned on three point contacts (rather like drinks 'coasters' but made of something substantial). This would provide a much smaller surface area for aural excitation, while pushing the resonant frequencies much higher, where sound energy to excite is likely to be less and equipment feet might be more effective at absorbing.

iii) Have the main rack main shelves themselves decoupled from the rack frame by point contacts, and the shelves damped, whether by the intricate routed channels some use or by applied damping material (or both), negating the apparent need for a second decoupled shelf/board to do the same. This is down to rack design - and I think some may indeed be like that.

iv) Have the rack dispense with conventional shelves entirely, instead having support bars or projections just adequately sized to take small isolation plates as in ii) - though that would require either a customised rack for each installation or standardisation of feet positions on all equipment, so would be likely to be either very costly or dedicated to a single equipment brand (such as Naim...)

i) and ii) could be simple, low cost DIY upgrades.

Hi IB,

your number IV sounds very much like the Spider from finite elemente, even down to the dampers, both the rubber and the ceraballs.

The first is what I have now, based on a design from Willi Bauer (dps). I have no photo to post, but you may want to google “Stubnmusi” (music in the living room, bavarian style) plus “info” and take a look through the door in the first picture.

Innocent Bystander posted:

I posed the following a couple of years ago, but no-one offered any answers...

It seems to have become common practice with equipment racks to have the rack shelf, then an additional shelf/board on top of it, on point contacts (domes etc), with the equipment sitting on that, while the equipment commonly has some form of elastomeric feet of its own.

Can anyone explain the logic of the extra board, and how it supposedly improves sound quality?

I ask because it seems to me that the extra board will create an additional 'sounding board' that will be excited by incident sound, causing vibrations at the board's resonant frequencies and thus potentially degrading sound quality unless the equipment feet provide adequate damping isolation or damping (in which case why bother in the first place?)

Surely a better approach would be either:

i) At the very least make the second shelf/board heavily damped (e.g. by adherent damping pads or coating along the lines of 'dedshete').

Ii) Rather than an extra shelf/board near to the size of a rack shelf, use small plates (whether glass, stone wood, round, square or triangular) just 2-3 inches across, under each equipment foot, each positioned on three point contacts (rather like drinks 'coasters' but made of something substantial). This would provide a much smaller surface area for aural excitation, while pushing the resonant frequencies much higher, where sound energy to excite is likely to be less and equipment feet might be more effective at absorbing.

iii) Have the main rack main shelves themselves decoupled from the rack frame by point contacts, and the shelves damped, whether by the intricate routed channels some use or by applied damping material (or both), negating the apparent need for a second decoupled shelf/board to do the same. This is down to rack design - and I think some may indeed be like that.

iv) Have the rack dispense with conventional shelves entirely, instead having support bars or projections just adequately sized to take small isolation plates as in ii) - though that would require either a customised rack for each installation or standardisation of feet positions on all equipment, so would be likely to be either very costly or dedicated to a single equipment brand (such as Naim...)

i) and ii) could be simple, low cost DIY upgrades.

 

I believe there are a few different approaches with racks, and you should consider which way with what's being supported.

Naim boxes and it's construction methods prefer the Naim Fraim, a slightly resonant relatively open and light method.   In tune with the engineered aspects within.

Other hifi,  heavy extruded panels, thin folded sheeting, methods of compliance etc will respond differently.  Some preferring a dead non resonance and others needing some way of channeling out the vibrational energy within.

TOBYJUG posted: 

.......others needing some way of channeling out the vibrational energy within.

You mean there are boxes out there that vibrate even more than Naim boxes ????