Years ago I was fortunate enough to grow up surrounded by musical instruments of all kinds and had a few friends who also spent their lifetimes involved in music. Among those, Jay Thomas, a sound engineer by trade and incredible cabinet maker along with Dick Boak of the famed Martin Guitar Company. During those early years Dick was in charge of purchasing the exotic woods and adobe for the Martin Company. He exposed the looks of those woods to Jay who as a cabinetmaker would purchase some and build racks to elegantly hold all of our stereo gear. Initially we had no clue what was going on but soon realized that the denser the wood used in the equipment racks, the better our hi-fi gear sounded.
Fast forward to today. I am no longer a fan of wood racking when absolute sonic performance is the goal. A block of wood or shelving vibrates and produces frequencies well within the audible range of human hearing. We commonly refer to this noise as ‘rack chatter’. The company I represent prefers to use metals for the building of equipment racks where the frequency range of the shelves, support rods and metal cones vibrating is well above or far below that of the human ear’s capability of detection. We prefer to entirely remove the audibility of vibrating wood racks from the overall environmental formula.
Example: listeners always state that MDF sounds OK but a hardened maple sounds much better. When comparing the two, MDF is made of sawdust, air and glue (polymers-plastics) and produces a very wide and very audible frequency range when subjected to vibration. Maple is denser containing less air molecules, no glues and has the advantage of a grain structure where laminar resonance will flow along the grains pathway and locate an exit via metal rods (shelf supports) or cones hence establishing an energy transfer methodology similar to the technology we are developing for use in audio and video equipment racking.
As Maple produces less audible frequency byproduct compared to MDF, the question remains… Does the solid wood actually sound better or are we just hearing much less of the audible frequencies caused from the density of the Maple wood vibrating?
Second Example: We have worked with clients where the aesthetics of steel is not an option; to them wood is preferable. I generally suggest they sample mahogany. Mahogany is much more difficult to work with due to its high density as compared to maple but the end result in every case to date: the listeners preferred the mahogany.
Questions to ponder:
Do the audible effects from a more dense wood reduce the sonic signature that vibrating wood adds in a sound room?
Do denser woods actually sound more musical or are we hearing less colorations or noise? Keep in mind we are listening to a block of wood vibrate in a listening room environment and not that of a spruce inlay on a tuned up Martin guitar.
As evidenced here on AudioGon feedback, clients repeatedly state Sistrum Platforms dramatically lower floor noise. As well, the soundstage immediately grows north, south, east and west. Despite other technical functions present within the Sistrum design, metals used in racking reduce the resonant frequency of wood via mechanical grounding and remove the effects leading to audible rack chatter hence providing the speaker system with more open space to play into.
There are many who say they prefer the sound of wood in their systems and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with that assessment or enjoyment, however until one attempts to remove or reduce rack chatter one may never know the full sound capability of their electronics and loudspeakers. We are extremely confident one will definitely and easily hear the differences.
Robert
Star Sound
