Sota Comet Grounding question


Hi,

I recently picked up a Sota Comet with a Jelco JA 250st tonearm for cheap because the arm needed rewiring. It was my first time rewiring, I used cardas wire and tags, and attached a ground wire inside the arm tube as well as one attached to the arm base. All the wiring connects to a terminal in the chassis, where the rca cables are soldered. The two ground wires connect to the grounding cable which runs to the lug on my preamp.

The question I have is regarding the ground lug that is at the bottom of the chassis. It looks to me like this lug connects to the motor. Where do I connect a ground wire from this to? I am getting an awful lot of static whenever I touch the platter which can be heard through the speakers, and occasionally when I touch the tonearm. There is no hum and everything sounds fine when a record is playing, but as far as I can tell the chassis is not grounded to anything which I’m hoping once this is done could solve the static issue. I tried running a ground wire from this chassis lug to the same lug on the preamp that the tonearm is grounded to which did not resolve the problem. 

Can anyone help me resolves this. I don’t get static from my Thorens or Rega tables, so I hope this is specific to the Sota turntable and can be easily fixed.


mcwatson

Showing 6 responses by mcwatson

Thanks, I contacted Sota and they said the chassis ground should be connected to the preamp. I still get a lot of static this way. The bearing well is some sort of Teflon or plastic so I can’t add a wire to that. I may revisit my tonearm wiring just to be sure I didn’t miss anything there and then try a humidifier or something like that.
Hi ebm,
Out of curiosity did you ground the motor to a preamp or amp or directly to a house ground? Connecting to my preamp isn’t working but maybe I need to make sure all the grounding posts in my system are more secure. I don’t know how to ground directly to an outlet. Thanks!
Great, thanks for that! I’ll give this a shot before I mess around with tonearm wires. Just curious if it make a difference if the wall outlet accepts two prongs versus three of I go this route? I have two different outlets near my rack and have both options.

sorry everyone for all the questions. Up til now I’ve just had to plug everything in and not think about all this.
Thanks I’ll give that arm a shot. I do feel that because my Rega and thorens tables play without any static issues there could still be a grounding issue with the Sota. Maybe I didn’t ground the arm and chassis correctly so I’m gonna re-visit that wiring. The jelco arm has two ground wires so maybe something is off there
Wow, almost all my outlets are two prong in my old NYC apartment. Guess I should contact the landlord about that. I’ve had to use a power strip for the amp and preamp because I only have the one three prong outlet near my audio rack