Gswaul,
Thanks for your comments. The wire loops are a surprising change, as silly seeming as the idea is. Even more surprising is what the full Ground Control device brings to a system.. My recommendation, of course, is that you should buy a set!!!! :=)
You still have tonal vividness an even more clearly locked in dimensionality, a bit faster response and a general sweetness to the sounds still to be obtained from the standard commercial GC's.
As Jejaudio points out, better materials are important and the Reference GC is noticeably more capable than the standard units. And then there are still the amplifier, preamplifier and source GC's to explore.
Bud |
Just to increase the Agony of those still on the fence over these small Ground Control items, here is a new review.
http://www.stereotimes.com
Bud |
My Postulate
Electrons move at about 1 meter per second in an AC impressed signal cable. Mostly they just jitter back and forth, under the control of an information packet we usually call "signal". A signal is comprised of E Field and B Field, with E Field being the moment when the signal changes vector. At this moment the electrons holding the signal twist the axis of an electron, attached to a dielectric end atom, to the obverse of the spin and axis of the holding electron. This in turn causes the equivalent electron on the other end of the open chain of atoms, comprising the dielectric molecular structure, to twist to match the holding electron. Incidentally, this his is how AC signal is transferred across a dielectric barrier.
This momentary hold for vector change is controlled by the charge threshold of the dielectric material and the subsequent release threshold and the time between these two appears to be affected to a degree by how many electrons can be signaling within a given area. This later is referred to as "dielectric constant". Holding electrons, without sufficient charge to affect the electron on the end of the dielectric molecule's atom, are lost from the coherent signal. The release threshold also provides a time interval to the resumption of the AC signal as a B Field event. These three events all contribute to the loss of signal coherency on the return portion of the signal through the load.
The loop of wire, as a shorted turn comprised of many strands of insulated wire in my usage, coated with a two part dielectric material, polyurethane and nylon, has an extremely low RAC and RDC, but it's useful path length is very long, when considered as an unterminated wave guide. The entire loop is at a lower state of impedance than the ground it is attached to and over a period of time actually fills the open orbits of the empty orbits found in the copper wire. Due to the triboelectric effect of the additional pieces of dielectric, in the official Ground Control, maintains this "filled" capacity, so long as there is a source of electrons to replace those that trickle away.
After attachment, those low level wide band signal components will be maintained in this unterminated wave guide. Meanwhile, being lost to poor dielectrics and boundaries between different pieces of metal, throughout the ground system provided, out to the local pole in the ground itself. I suppose we could claim quantum choice effects here, for the signal, as it moves at the speed of light through the pieces of wire involved in this, but I don't really think it's necessary to argue at that level.
Your notice of greater dynamic range is most likely just a drop in the noise floor and more coherence to the originating signal of information, on the back half of the signal waveform. These two are linked, since signal dropped from the "information packet" of a coherent information data stream will become a random event and cause random charged electrons to pass the information back through the load as noise.
Bud |
I won't tell you to try them, I don't know what they are. Can you provide a link to an informative article please?
Bud |
Lacee, after poking around Google I finally stumbled onto the web site for the Walker Links. From their description I would have to say no, they do not perform the same function that Ground Control does. You can test this by obtaining a 2 foot long length of inexpensive lamp cord,. Split it into the two halves that make up this sort of cord and strip both ends of both cords of plastic insulation for about 2 inches. Make a loop out of each cord, twist the wires together and insert this twisted grouping into the hole in the stem of your black lug speaker terminal. Play music and allow about two to three hours for the full effect to show up. This is not as refined as Ground Control, but will give you a pretty good idea of what is available from our product. I suspect these loops will work very well with the Walker units and the commercial Ground Control will perform quite a bit better. |
Thank you for doing that Lacee.
As for our implementation of this novel idea, we use 140 strands of wire and control the amount and types of dielectric materials used. Anyone could do the same research, ad hoc as it was, and duplicate our results. Or you can buy our results for quite a bit less cost than the amount of time it will take you to learn the relatively subtle things you need to know.
I am a transformer engineer and I am aware of wire and dielectric investigations, as it is part of my professional career. None of the thoughts behind Ground Control are collected as a single concept in the scientific literature I am aware of, but each of the component understandings is well supported.
What we have developed in Ground Control will not leave you with a "feeling" that the reproduction has changed for the better. The changes will be quite obvious, as information retention improvements, and they won't be on the leading edge of the signal. It is still surprising to me how much information is lost to corruption of the back half of all wave forms, after they have passed through the "load". This portion of all signal information is then pulled back through the load, after a vector change in the field event has expossed the signal holding electrons to local dielectrics, somewhre between your speaker cables, the safety ground outside your building and the power sub station down the road.
Bud |
Hevacel,
I couldn't agree more!!!!!!!
Everyone, please note that bare copper wire not only will not provide any benefit to your listening experience but is a safety issue, just as it would be if you were using bare copper wire as your speaker cables.
You should be protected from the power grid by your amplifier, with particular protection provided by current limiting devices in solid state amps and output transformers in tube devices. The voltages in your speaker cables are not considered to be lethal by the worlds safety agencies but using bare copper wire will still cause destruction of your equipment.
However, as an added safety note, you should not at any moment interrupt the connection to safety ground in your equipment, unless you know for a FACT that it is "Double Insulated". All two prong plugged electrical equipment must be double insulated to pass UL, CSA or CE and thereby are safe to use without a third prong connected to safety ground. You should never use a safety ground defeating plug, period. Use isolation signal transformers from Jensen, Sowter, O-Netics, Lundahl and others to break the ground loops in your equipment, if you are suffering hum problems. You will not suffer a degradation in sonic qualities by doing so.
Our Ground Control has as much protection from accidental exposure to safety ground as does the typical speaker cable, with only the prongs of the mounting fork or body of the RCA plug being uncovered by a suitable dielectric material. Even the 140 strands of four nines copper wire are insulated, individually. You can use these devices without fear of death or destruction, RF noise or self levitation.
As for experimenting, if you don't use an insulated wire, you will get no benefit, so don't bother.
Bud |
Probably not such a simple tweak really. Just does a number of things with the least amount of stuff. You really should buy one of the $150 sets and test it out against your DIY item, just to make sure you have all of the benefit. Not dissing your efforts at all, you have just left out aa couple of descriptions of the changes wrought by the full package. You can always return them, claiming lack of change....
I do find it very interesting to discover just how good the equipment we have really is, once the back half of the wave form is properly supported. Neat to know that even Red Book audio, out of a cheap Sony CD / SACD player, can sound wonderful and that a Nikko Beta I SS preamp from the 80's is an incredibly delicate and nuanced preamp, not the hissy, hashy high end, thing that most people find with them. You really do need to explore the RCA Ground Control devices.
Bud |
Sounds like what we found the first time we used the XShadow 100% silver spades on speakers and amp posts, quite a bit better inner detail and nuance, even though it was still just from the back side of the signals. I was quite skeptical that solid silver would be better than copper / gold plated spades, but my doubts disappeared rather quickly. Careful listening showed that leading edges of all sounds were just as they had been without any Ground Control, and that the silver made more"sense" out of the rest of the signal than did the gold platted GC's. And yet, the gold platted units only sounded murky in comparison with the the solid silver spaded units. In comparison to none, it was again back to the "not ever leaving my system" mind set.
The RCA's reveal a greater difference between silver and gold plate units. The silver RCA's, on the preamp, caused me to remove the internal GC's from the Sony player and plug in two gold plated RCA's in place of them. Silver RCA's on the Sony was just a bit much, very resolving, without actually curing the OPAMP ground side starvation. The gold units seemed best there.
Still learning about these little jewels.
Bud |
David,
When I provide EnABL'd drivers to folks wanting 40 to 60 db down in coherent information, below the typically available 40 db down, I do provide partial GC's attached directly to the drivers. These are not intended to provide all of the benefit of a full on Ground Control, as is available commercially. Primary function is to make certain that the driver has access to the back half of the wave form for information that provides spatial clues and removes the starved, sick sound, of densely recorded material, when the ground side is starved of carrier electrons. These GC's typically do not have cotton sleeves or attachment lugs and as Jejaudio has pointed out, both of these are important portions of the GC approach to information retention.
Just attaching a piece of wire, in a loop will likely have some effect. Not necessarily a positive effect, but for proof of principle it should show that while somewhat silly, the concept does work. I would suggest a 2 foot long piece of lamp cord, split into two pieces. Strip about an inch of insulation off of both ends of one piece, make a loop and twist the wires together. Insert this section of bare wire into your speaker box lug connection, on the return side, black, connector. Do the same for the other side. Then sit back and listen carefully as the wire begins to alter what you hear. I doubt you will like it initially. A few hours into listening, not necessarily all at one sitting by any means, remove the wires and listen for a short period, then reattach them and listen again. I am pretty sure you will "get it".
The GC is a carefully controlled "generalist" tuning of what you will find in the lamp cord loop. It is aimed at the sweet spot for the vast majority of speakers and electronics and while they can be further refined for a specific system, it is an agonizingly tedious business and most often well into the "placebo" realm of wished for improvements. The commercial versions will provide you with more than you hoped for. And, until you delve into EnABL'd drivers, a very clear improvement in tonal richness, transient correctness, tonal vividness and coherent information, that allows your brain to reconstruct the space that the sonic event occurred within.
EnABL'd drivers will respond just as stock ones will, but a specific set directly on the drivers, will add even more to what the commercial units bring.
Bud |
I think you may know quite a bit more than nuthin Jejaudio. Thank you for your appreciation of our efforts and, by the by, the Reference models do use solid silver speaker lugs and solid silver internals for the RCA connectors and both use Wonder solder for the connections. The "standard" units have gold plated over pure copper for the lugs or copper alloy for the RCA units
Bud |
I cannot answer your question Lacee. I have zero experience with the Bybee devices. I think they, along with the Walker devices, are used to strip RF signals and their down sampled resonances from speaker cables, but that is the extent of my, most likely misunderstood, knowledge.
I think I would recommend getting a pair of the standard GC's and trying them, first on the speakers and then on the amplifier ground connections. I use the standard GC on my amplifiers, a reference there just does not provide the balance between resolution of sound source retained information, versus resolution of sound stage information. This allows me to use the reference GC on the speakers to retain that source specific information there, without compromising the sound stage.
Since you have had some success with a DIY variation I suspect the standard GC will work well for you. If I were you, I think I would experiment a little further with the DIY devices, before spending any real money. Try both longer and shorter loops of the original materials and then deliberately change the type of plastic on the wire jacket. Lamp cord is PVC, Monster Cable is often polyurethane and some other cables utilize polypropylene, Teflon and pure (smelly) raw vinyl. You can also take some bare stranded wire and put it into a polyolefin shrink tube. The reason to bother is to find out how your system responds to the various dielectric constants of these materials.
If the best sound comes from the shrink tube covered cable, then you will probably want at least one set of Reference GC's in the amplifier / speaker circuit. If the PVC sounds best then don't bother with Reference speaker or amplifier GC's. Instead use the reference RCA on your preamp and standard lugged GC's on your speakers.
This is a pretty rough guide and you can expect that even the standard GC is going to outperform an ad hoc experiment, but at least you will not just be guessing about the direction to take.
If you do further experiments do report back please, your information will be welcome.
Bud |
Pixelphoto,
My system is pretty humble also, so don't feel bad about yourself! I have a friend in the hill country in Texas with a massively expensive McIntosh / B&W 802 system. Before GC application I wasn't overly impressed with anything but the sheer scale of the reproduction, compared to my system. After Standard GC's were applied, her system was the equal of mine in all categories and firmly trounced it in scale. But who cares? I still have torrents of music to listen to at home and so does she.
Do experiment a bit further with what I mentioned to Lacee above and then treat yourself and get a pair of the real thing. I doubt you will be sorry you did and you will have a reason to experiment further, in other locations in your system. Everywhere there is a commercially viable piece of electronics gear, there is a potential for improvement in your overall system's musical values by correcting the ground side information retention.
Thanks for your comments by the way, it is good to hear that more and more folks are digging into this relatively unexplored area and coming up with gold. You might want to explore EnABL speaker processes at some point..... and yes, it will work on your system and yes, you can learn how to do it successfully. Anyone with fingers attached to hands and stereoscopic vision can do so.
Bud |
Koestner,
I have just been reporting what users have forwarded to me. The one user, with a fully differential system, reported no change at all, neither better or worse. A balanced system is not always fully differential, there can be a ground reference in the system and that is all that is known to be needed for GC's to perform. Obviously, Ozzie is having great success with his balanced system.
To date we have seen two GC's up for sale and none have been returned to us as unusable, other than the fully differential system rejection.
The RCA's do seem to take longer to charge than the spade lug items. I ascribe this to signal level and relative current levels involved, with the RCA's not normally seeing more than 3 or 4 volts peak and only ten's of ma in current.
I have noticed that the louder you play the system, over what you will normally listen to, the quicker the spade lug versions charge. This does not seem to be true with the RCA's though, or at least not in my experience. Again, I think it is related to the signal levels involved as
I would suggest that you try out a pair of standard lugged GC's. If they don't work out for you, return them and please report back in either case. The more different styles of systems that use them, the more data points we have and all information is good information.
Bud |
How did you fix the various combination's together. I have found it unusually important to have similar metals, even if there is a tin/lead solder in the connection. The best so far had been all copper with a tin coating and no lead anywhere. |
