h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am a hifi enthusiast. We have moved house and I’m using it as an excuse to make some changes to the hifi setup. I want to ditch the old rubbishy flatpack rack thingy I had and get something decent to stand the system on – it’s a good setup and it should make a noticeable difference. Any hifi support should be dead rigid and non-resonant at audio frequencies, and you can spend literally thousands on specially designed shelving systems which achieve just that.

However, just as some people use paving slabs as speaker stands (superbly rigid and cost only a few quid), I’d like to try something similar for the actual system itself. The problem is that standard slabs are not wide enough, given that some of the width of each ‘shelf’ has to be given over to supporting the levels above. Also I would probably need to cement the layers together to avoid it toppling if pushed from the side – I don’t think the component at the bottom would fare well with ¼ tonne of stone on top of it! However, I don’t want to cement it so tightly that it cannot be disassembled if needed later. I thought perhaps bathroom sealant or tile cement might do the trick.

Cosmetically I would probably paint the slabs. If done in gloss black they could look as good as some of the high-end commercial designs.

Has anyone tried this sort of thing?

.....erm, so h2g2 doesnt like certain punctuation now?

It may be worth putting rigid supports under your speakers and cinyl turntables, but it is a complete waste to put them under your other equipment. These do not vibrate at audio frequency as all the signal processing is in electrical form, so protecting them against audio vibration does not affect the sound in any way.

There's plenty of specialist equipment sold to hi-fi enthusisasts which does nothing whatsoever.

I think you might be right. I have a good record deck, but use CDs mostly. The jury is still out on how much CDs are effected by vibration. Any vibration a CD player picks up is not passed on as acoustic feedback of course, but there is a school of thought that suggests it might drop a few bits of data. Given that the laser is tracking pits one tenth the width of human hair, I can see how it might be put off the task in hand by audio vibration. The point is, I am hoping to make a very good support for hardly any money, and then it doesnt matter if it has negligable effect - it will just be as good as it can possibly be.

Oh, and valve amps are also adversely effected. Valves can be microphonic - if you tap one you can sometimes hear it at the output. I dont have a valve amp though, so I dont know why I said that really. I was just showing off