Grounding a turntable and a tonearm

Justin, where do you live? @noromance may have a point. Dry air allows static to accumulate. Forced hot air systems without humidifiers are static generators. 

Throw away any paper sleeves as they will gladly donate electrons to PVC. Read about the Triboelectric effect. The next best way to deal with the static is to give it a pathway to ground. Hudson HiFi makes a conductive sweep are that you hook up to ground and it does just that. It discharges the record during play and sweeps any incidental dust out of the way.

You try to hook up all your grounds to one point. In this case they should all be connected to the phono stage. The phono stage should be connected to house ground. If you were to still have a hum you start using cheaters of equipment till you find the culprit. 

Humidifier.

To reduce hum caused by poor electrical grounding, one often has to ground the turntable, as well as the tonearm, usually to the phono stage chassis ground lug. So that’s electrical ground, and that can cause hum if ground is poor, or if the two ground planes are at different voltage levels with respect to zero voltage. to reduce ticks and pops caused by static electricity, one often also has to ground the turntable. The solution is the same, but the problems are different in origin. Ticks and pops and static arcs jumping across to your finger as you touch the tonearm are caused by static electric charge build up. That happens for many reasons, but in my opinion, the most common cause is us. When we walk up to the turntable, we often build up a static charge on our bodies, which is immediately transferred to the LP. Furthermore, the act of removing an LP from a sleeve will in itself cause a charge to build up on the LP surface. There are many other aspects to this, and there are a few other threads about this with some good and some bad information.

Poor ground caused HUM, not crackling or pops. 

There’s a fair amount to static electricity generated from vinyl playback. That static can cause “crackling and pops” from attracting particles into the groove so fiercely the stylus cannot dislodge it, or by discharging through the signal wire (and into the phono stage). Grounding the bearing and the tone arm is good.

That’s just it I keep very clean records and have a static gun.  These were actually brand new vinyl out of the wrapper.  MoFi One steps so they were in good rice paper covers and bursted.  When I touched the tonearm after playing I would get shocked and with the turntable off and tonearm docked it would make a static sound through the speakers when removing a record 

You need to clean your LP's to prevent crackling and pops.

Sound like a snap 😉

Poor ground caused HUM, not crackling or pops. No HUM, your existing ground is fine.

You need to clean your LP's to prevent crackling and pops.

 Static and popping sounds more like dirty vinyl than a ground issue....

@justinrphillips 

The standard SOTA armboard is MDF and non conductive, so the tonearm ground and TT ground cannot form a ground loop.

I would connect both the arm ground and TT ground to the phono grounding post.

You can get carbon fibre brushes with anti static properties to help remove any static build up in the record prior to playing. I use one from Analog Relax.

Sounds like a plan.

Do I wire the tone arm into the ground on the turntable, and then run a wire to the phono stage

 

But I am having a nightmare time with static and popping etc on the turntable and someone said I have not grounded the turntable.

Try it a few ways, sounds like you cannot make it worse.

If you bring it over to the RCAs/XLRs you could tie it there if there is a place… or run it around/with the RCAs and tie it to the preamp.

Just make sure. It is slack enough that it is not like tying the house outside of a saloon and keeping the sub platter from moving.