Product Description
The Audio Beat full review is here, well worth a read.
"As I looked over my nightly listening notes, I found them littered with exclamations of discovery about the improvements I heard to the system I already had. My analog rig was no exception -- with the Scuttle for support, it never sounded better.
Unlike a basic audio rack with rigid structural elements, the Scuttle’s frame is actually part of the overall solution. It causes vibrations acting upon it to do work and dissipate. The frame comprises two end pieces and three shelf supports. SRA builds these from very thin layers of carefully selected hardwoods and softwoods, precision cut as whole pieces on a CNC mill. The pieces are laid up in a specific order with each layer glued to the next using three types of viscoelastic adhesive. When vibrations run into something viscoelastic, they attempt to move it -- to push around the molecules of the material. The resulting molecular friction absorbs the energy of this movement, then the "stretched" viscoelastic material springs back to its original shape, converting that energy to heat, which gets passed on to neighboring viscoelastic material and finally to the surrounding structure.
As you might expect, custom-designed viscoelastic adhesives and coatings are a house specialty at SRA. Their use reflects another aspect of the Scuttle’s similarity to the Craz². That rack's internal skeleton of alloy tubing retains similar compounds, while the wood in the Scuttle’s frame plays the part of the bread in a multi-layer viscoelastic sandwich.
The outside layers of each frame component receive a distinctive coating of a black phenolic composite that adds considerable strength. Once on the frame, SRA machines this resin to a specific pattern; up close, it appears slightly wavy and random. The pattern helps frustrate the tendency (known as skin effect) for vibrations to travel freely on smooth surfaces, growing in amplitude as they gain momentum.
Where each end support meets the floor is a black footer cap holding an adjustable spike. With three shelves in place, the 250-pound mass of a spiked Scuttle offers a secure platform for audio gear. Each footer assembly decouples its spike from the frame to help isolate the main unit from floor-borne energy. The end supports also hold the shelf supports in place via SRA’s blue isoBushings. These decouple the shelf supports from the end pieces, allowing them to float.
In fact, the entire Scuttle framework enjoys 6DOF, or 6 degrees of freedom, meaning it can flex freely in any direction. To help keep it from racking out of ideal square, SRA fixes three horizontal beams of gray composite material to both end frames at the back of the rack but not to the shelf supports. With shelves in place, I barely saw the gray beams.
The Scuttle’s shelves sit on black isolator pads mounted on the composite crossbeams attached front-to-back on the shelf frame. On a wide Scuttle there are three of these beams, each able to flex independently based on load. The pads create the connection between the highly damped Scuttle framework and its shelves, without changing the vibrational characteristics of either.
The black isolator pads are a combination of two materials joined by another in-house-designed viscoelastic adhesive. The lower section of the pad couples to the rack yet decouples at contact with the shelving unit. I speculated that these pads were the functional analog of the Craz²'s component-tuned isopods, with a broader weight tolerance."
Please contact us for exact shipping costs (these things are 130-200kg per rack!)
Dimensions:
2-shelf = 600 x 760 x 560mm (HxWxD)
3-shelf = 915 x 760 x 560mm
Shelf height = 300mm
Shelf width = 485mm
