So now here’s my dilemma. As it seems my room is telling me not to put the equipment between the speakers, I need to decide exactly
where to put them behind me.
My room is planned for some work, both construction and electrical. I’ll get to that in a bit. Right now I have two racks - my old (which is an interim until I replace it with something better) wooden rack where all my small signal and digital gear is, and a sand and shot loaded VPI rack - with a 22”x32”x3” maple platform on it, and on top of that two more platforms - for my Avenger and its BLDC motor and my phono pre.
Here‘s a rough (not exactly to scale) drawing of my room with the speakers on the right, the main listening seat, and the two racks on the left.
Note the inset entryway. Here’s what it
could look like when I’m done with the construction.
A bit of a change - I’m going to go with a single entry door. That will get me more wall length in the bottom left corner. So I could stick with two racks, but that would mean I’d need about a 16’ run of XLR IC from the phono pre (lower left) to XP20 (upper left). I’m already going to have to deal with a long XLR IC from the ‘20 to the monos, so that’s a lot of expense that I could in theory avoid.
However, that upper left corner? There’s a window on the long wall right behind that rack position. If I stick with two racks, that source rack would be short enough to allow use of the window. If I go with one larger rack, that is a problem. Also, if I put everything on one rack there, I’d have to pull it so far away from the wall on the right to be able to get on either side of the TT that I may as well not even have a window there. There are some WAF considerations I have to accept.
So it would seem the “right” place is the lower left corner in a single rack solution. With one entry door that gives me plenty of space to center the TT for access on either side, and with no height restriction I’m good there as well. But that means the cables to the monos have to run right across the entry threshold!
So, is there such a thing as a “thruway” threshold cover that will let me run cables underneath it? Is this my best solution? As a reminder, it’s already decided the equipment will not go between the speakers.