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A choice of footers is available, with SGR recommending the flat base for timber-suspended flooring and the spike system for solid concrete floors. Both types are constructed from marine-grade stainless steel superbly finished and feature a ball-bearing floating scheme similar to the Finite Elemente family of Ceraball feet. Fine threading allows for small incremental adjustments for precise leveling. A very clever machined aluminum cable support system can be ordered as an option to keep clutter at bay. All components feel solid and unusually heavy and are extraordinarily well finished. From the packaging to the end product, the SGR rack oozes pure class.
Assembly is piss easy. From unpacking to final placement where my Finite Elemente Pagode Signatures used to live took just an hour and a half. And that was for two racks of three shelves each. I used the flat base feet as recommended for my wooden floors. Simply screw the feet to the first cross brace and then screw the four posts to the brace. Take care to position the cable management hooks on the grooved post (two posts per level feature the indented template for the hook system).
Finally screw the viscoelastic vibration isolators (VEVI from now on) to their receptacles. Now you’re ready to place the platform on them, in my case done up in gorgeous black gloss grain finish. The platform has four small receptacles that allow metal grommets atop the VEVI to slip in for proper suspension without the platform slipping or moving horizontally. That’s it. Now you’re ready for the next level. Once you’ve assembled the last, solid aluminum pucks screw into the tops of the four lateral posts to finish off the construction. Done.
Beauty unaccompanied by virtue is as a flower without perfume. There’s no doubting the elegance and refinement of the SGR rack. There’s a fair bit of perfume to be whiffed here. Assemble such an exalted component-quality rack system of massive structural integrity and you’re not going to do your electronics’ sound potential any harm. Quite pleasingly in fact the SGR Signature racks displayed some subtle yet worthwhile sonic differences over the Finite Elemente racks I’d been using long term. I attribute these to the conceptual difference in design and execution. The FEs couple to multiple spiking points to address and drain vibrational issues whereas the SGR racks decouple and float the electronics via the VEVI system and the utterly resonance-dead platforms.
