Box Furniture Company D3S Audio Rack Review

BOX Furniture Company basically has one design that they make into a couple of different racks and an amp stand. I had the chance to hear the D3S in my system, which is their Double-wide rack, 3 shelve high, Sapele wood rack. As I said, the BOX Furniture Co. racks are beautiful units that really are fine furniture. Company owner Anthony Abbate not only makes audio furniture, he is also a designer and maker of fine contemporary furniture and Shoji screens. The D3S is 26” high, 18” deep, the top shelf 43.5” wide, and the two other shelves are 40” wide. The spacing between the shelves is fixed at 10” and 8” respectively. Anthony will consider other configurations as long as they don’t compromise the stand’s stability.

He builds each rack from a frame skeleton of either solid Anigre or Sapele wood with hand cut mortise and tenon joinery at all joint locations. The inset shelves are a laminate of five different woods and three different glues that are recessed and glued into the frame for increased rigidity. The rack is coupled to the floor with adjustable aluminum spikes with locking collars that make for easy leveling of the rack.

Setup

There is no assembly for the rack itself other than putting the cones on and leveling the unit. Matt at Pitch Perfect said the equipment should be set on the inset shelves and not the hardwood frame. I would think that is obvious, but maybe not to everyone. Matt said that Anthony had voiced the shelf materials carefully for audio equipment and that placing equipment directly on the frame could deaden the sound.

I simply put my Shindo 301 on the top shelf directly in the center. On the far left of the second shelf, I placed my Shindo Giscours preamp and besides it the Auditorium 23 Homage T1 SUT. On the bottom shelf to the far right, I placed my Wavac EC-300B and still had room for the Audience aR6-T on the left side. I especially liked that although the overall appearance was crowed, it was in fact quite elegant and understated with the BOX rack’s simple and functional lines.

How Well Does it Work for Audio?

I refuse to ask how it sounds, because the only sound it makes is if you rap on it with your knuckles or hit with something else. The real question of course is how my system sounds with the equipment sitting on it. Simply put, music is liberated and comes to life in a most relaxed and natural way. When I placed my Shindo and Wavac gear on the BOX rack, it seemed to release the equipment to simply let music come to life.

With the BOX rack, my system sounded very powerful with explosive dynamics, great energy, and dynamics. The sound had a nice sense of ease and the soundstage was more expansive and had greater scale. Compared to putting the 301 table or the Wavac EC-300B on the Zoethecus platform or the Silent Running Audio’s Ohio Class platform, the sound might not have been quite as super detailed, nor did the instruments seem to come out of quite as black a background. The only problem was that each of those products already made my system sound more like a great audio system, while the BOX rack allowed it to sound more like real music. Truth is, anything I set on it, the BOX rack was able to clean up the sound and give the sound a more realistic sense of life.

Conclusion

So, I’ve spent some time in the last few months listening to how different platforms and racks, designed to handle the vibrations that an audio system has to deal with, affected my system’s performance. I would say that even when it comes to vibration control, it’s still a system thing. I can see the SRA or the Zoethecus working better with certain systems, but for my system the BOX Furniture Company rack allowed it to sound better than I had ever heard it before.

Compared to similar sized racks from companies like HRS, Rix Rax, and SRA, the BOX Furniture Rack has to be one of the most outstanding bargains in all of high-end audio-land.