Grounding the system


Dear fellow A-goners, do you have experience with independent grounding of your system?

I have a (water) radiator for warming the house close by my system in our living / listening room, and it is not a big effort to connect to it with a thin lead / cable.

I have experimented a bit, and generally found the sound to improve. I have ended up connecting all my equipment to the ground, with a "star" scheme centred on the preamp chassis. The elements of my speakers are connected also. From the star centre i have a lead to the radiator.

Results are subtle, but towards more consistency and holography. Yet i wonder since at times the sound seems a bit tame also. I may be doing this the wrong way, or not optimal.

Advice? I read about improvements from independent grounding of the whole system in the Danish High fidelity magazine some years ago, but I've not read much on this topic in US websites.

Oystein
o_holter

Showing 1 response by aball

I have grounded all 7 of my components' chassis together. This has been sufficient to reduce the differential chassis voltages from a maximum of 35mV to about 2mV. Both of my preamps have a particularly low resistance between their chassis and AC ground so an additional external ground to the outlet is not necessary. I also have dedicated wiring back to my breaker box which eliminates the temptation of running a risky separate ground, as Gs5556 points out above.

Joe - keep in mind that for many components, AC ground and chassis ground are tied together. Floating components have become rather rare these days.

As far as sound quality resulting from the grounding, it clearly improved, pun intended. I was very impressed with the improvement I got from grounding my Koras in particular and it virtually eliminated the tiny amount of ground hum I had in my MC240. I highly recommend doing this in any system so long as it doesn't create a hum problem of its own.

Arthur