Equipment Rack Between Speakers

Having the gear between the speakers tends to be more photogenic, but our living space (and chief decorator) pretty much dictates that the gear goes on a side wall.

Dealing with the same issue. Large sound anchor rack with multiple sources.  Either side wall....long speaker cables. Or rack to be positioned close to back wall with speakers 2-3 feet in front and to the side of the rack.

Rack is approximately 4.5 feet tall and 5 foot wide. 

I could balance side placement with bookshelf but long speaker cables are pricey. 

Advice?

I have my equipment on a side wall, but that’s because I have a fireplace in between my speakers that juts out from the wall about 20”.  On the fireplace I have an 85” TV.  While completely independent from my two channel audio, I also have home theater speakers on the same wall.  Playing my two channel audio system, I’ve had two friends who had been in the high end audio business, ask me if my center channel speaker was playing, because of the lack of a L/R speaker localization.  My point is, just because you don’t follow all of the audiophile “rules” doesn’t mean you can’t achieve a great 3D sound stage.  

Such luxuries are few and far between. Most of us do with what we're given. 

I have arranged my system to have the electronics on the front wall between the speakers in three different rooms and it has always worked fine. Fortunately, they have been fairly large rooms where I could put the speakers out into the room at least 5 feet from the front wall. The imaging has been great and I've heard no negative effect from having the equipment between/behind the speakers. The equipment (except for a TV) acts as a diffuser. I also use dowel CD racks which also act as diffusors. The speakers I had for most of that time were Mirage M3si which have rear firing midrange and tweeters for ambiance. I now have a pair of Thiel CS6 which are more directional.

I suspect that the people saying you should never put your equipment behind your speakers are the ones who would much rather have you spend thousands of dollars on commercial duffusers/absorbers/traps etc.

Besides bass management, which a completely different issue, the biggest room problem is slap echo and the decay time of that echo. You can control the slapiness with diffusion and the decay time through absorbtion. Placing your equipment on the front wall just becomes one element of room acoustics that you have to work with to get things right.