Ideas re putting rack inside a "closet?"

Bartolo

Well-Known Member
Jan 31, 2019
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We’re having a new home built. Both my wife and the builder want the hi fi boxes inside of a ‘closet’ that he’s happy to custom build. In our current room, 2 racks, 4-levels each (Naim Fraim) are off to the side next to one of the speakers. Personally, I would be happy to recover the floor space lost to 2 racks. Turntable (Rega P10) sits on top of one of the racks, and it's happy there.

As in our current home, there will be a fireplace on an outer wall and the natural place for the speakers will be on either side. But if I don’t have to take up so much space IN the room with 2 racks next to one of the speakers…fine with me! And this closet would be relatively close to the speakers; it'll cost me a few thousand in new longer speaker cables.

Any of you with this type of arrangement? Any photos? Any pro's or con's? If the builder can find the space, which I think he can, he can build whatever we want. Can have nice doors (that won’t jar and thus skip an LP), nice lighting, and we can run conduit for speaker cables. And run ethernet in.

I'm Googling for stuff like this, but dont see much online, on Pinterest, etc.

My original plan was to trade in the 7 Naim boxes for a nice integrated/streamer/phono stage 3-box system, but if he can fit all this into a closet it'd be just fine. I do enjoy my current system.
 

PeterA

Well-Known Member
Dec 6, 2011
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Here are some thoughts: if you have a dry basement below the listening room you might wanna put your amplifier down there and have the speaker cables come through the floor to the speakers. That way you can keep your speaker cables and just get a longer interconnect.

Make sure you have ventilation in the closet so things don’t overheat. Consider keeping the turntable out in the room so you don’t always have to open the closet door. If you have a remote for volume control he will have to figure out how the remote will function behind the closet door.

Another option is to make the walls very strong and have all the gear plus the turntable in the closet on shelving attached to the walls rather than the floor. Or have a floating floor and put everything on a rack connected to the floating floor. I floating I just mean the floor to the closet being on a platform on columns to the basement separate from the floor structure and wall structure of the closet.

Dedicated electrical circuits to all the gear in the closet. Lots of possibilities. Sounds like a fun project.
 
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Ron Resnick

Site Co-Owner, Administrator
Jan 24, 2015
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In Manhattan, in a one bedroom apartment, there was a walk-in closet near the living room. I liked being able to put the turntable, the phono stage and the line stage in the closet, out of the line of fire of the speakers.

The bottom of the closet door was high enough off the floor to provide a gap for the interconnects. I could set up a record, start playing, and close the door behind me. I liked very much that the closet provided almost complete acoustic isolation from the speakers.

We (the collective "we") spend so much time, research, money and brain damage trying to figure out footers and constrained layer damping platforms and fancy racks and the like. But, in my opinion, no tweak beats getting the turntable physically out of room -- out of the line of fire of the loudspeakers

Sorry Peter: for me the whole benefit was to keep the turntable out of the room.
 
Last edited:

rugyboogie

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May 30, 2010
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For one of our clients in 1997 we had a purpose 2 channel room build where the equipment was located in a closet. As Peter noted having proper ventilation is tres important. We made sure that the back of the closet was removable to allowed for easy cable, gear changes.
As far as a remote is concerned cloth front for closet door or glass will allow for the remote to work. If door is solid a repeater that needs to be wired in to control will work for the components.
Good luck.
 

Bartolo

Well-Known Member
Jan 31, 2019
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Thanks for the input thus far! I'm not worried about the remote; I can control volume through my Naim phone app, and never use the IR remotes for anything else anyway.
 

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