Tvad, I am ahead of you. I have three types of cheaters. Mine with the use of AudioTop on all sound best. The cheap grey ones sound worse. Also, I tried a cheater on a cord that did not have a ground wire. It was far superior with the cheater off.
Cytocycle, I tried to selectively remove the ground wire from one outlet in my IsoClean outlet box. It did not work as all the outlets are grounded together through the chassis. I could not figure out how to isolate all outlets from the solid copper chassis.
I have thought of just hacksawing off the ground pin but that shoots down reselling them. |
Al, yes another problem. The Stealth Dream power cords that I am using have terminations that cannot be opened. They are glued on. Twarted at every turn save cheater plugs. |
Undertow, as I told Porter, one cannot get inside the plugs on Stealth Dream cables. They are glued on. |
Guys, I tried floating everything. That was the easiest thing to do and some have long recommended it. But I found the grounded preamp superior, and you do not have to worry about statistic charge buildup especially in the winter. I must say, however, that with all my outlets' grounds tied together even thought the outlet box was not grounded, means that the energy in their individual grounds commingles. I never really tried everything ungrounded with no ties between anything else.
I appreciate everyone seeking to resolve my problem, but I guess the answer seems to be that there are no high end cheater plugs. Even Purist doesn't make them. |
Jafox, I did look into the Accustic Arts dac and Drive One to see about that. It would be easy on the transport and very hard to get to on the dac.
Meanwhile, I continue to use the cheaters I made. There is another way also. The Dream Powers do not have a circuit ground. I could sell the Digitals and buy the Powers. |
Dazzdax, I cannot tell you relative to being totally floating, but a system having only one ground, removes multiple routes to ground. One way is through the interconnects and the other is through the ground pin on the ac cord. While I did not have any problems with hum as a result of these ground loops, especially with the H-Cat, it was reducing the clarity of the sound, most notably in the bass. I guess with no ground anywhere you have no current to ground. I don't know what happens to the leakage currents from your transformers.
Imin2u, I think this is an urban myth and fortunately so. Many components, in particular cd players and dvd players have either have two pin connectors, no ground pin on their IEC, or no wire connected to it internally. No ground also affords no protection whatsoever. My home insurance agent did not know what I was talking about, saying that many of the homes he insures have no ground wiring as both Al and I experienced in home built in the 40s and 50s. |
Carl109, if I thought there was such a risk, I would not do it. This is an urban myth. |
Rex, I am not asking you to ignore this. He basically tells you to live with the problems of ground loops. He ignores the fact that many component have no ground connection. And he ignore that many home presently lack three wire electrical supplies. He also ignores that most faults will result in tripping the breaker. All I can say is that my city's electrical department was unconcerned and my insurance company expressed no concern. Thanks for your concern, however. |
Rex, please don't assume that I am doing this purely on a logic of my own. There is little question that having the grounds wires are a more safe condition than not having them. It also would be yet safer to have no electricity in your home. Please reread my initial post and remember that I asked only about the availability of quality cheater plugs. My posting to which you refer was in response to Carl109 trying to educate me.
I don't agree that Mr. Whitlock is not ignoring the points that I have made, but it is, of course, your life as it is mine. I think the odds of anything happening within a component that does not cause the breaker to trip and for anyone to touch the unit and provide a ground, is considerable lower than driving your car to work and having a fatal accident. I never said anything about "without risk", you did.
Thank you for the insincere wishes of good luck.
Albert, I did float the preamp also tonight just to see if there was further improvement. You are right. The dynamics, clarity, and ambient information are further improved. In the past, I had done all of this and also minimized ac volt leakage with the orientation of the ac plug. But this time the impact seems far greater. |
I am thinking about trying one of these diode devices. Until the voltage on the ground get up to nearly one volt, there is no ground.
http://www.ebtechaudio.com/humxdes.html |
Albert, it is basically two diodes that only provide a ground at nearly one volt, below that there is no ground. As I would be using it, it would just provide safety, which so concerns some. It amounts to a cheater plug. |
Cyclonicman, can you please explain? I went to the website but could not find a "adaptor to allow the use of a high end cable on a cheater plug." |
In Canada, they are illegal, but the reality is that it is very improbable that anyone would get shocked. It is mainly UL making money. The EU probably also makes them illegal. They are responsible for the crappy binding posts with plastic covers. Apparently they thought someone would plug and ac cord into the amp binding post banana holes. It probably would be best to get such people out of the gene pool.
If you have a Tripoint grounding unit or the Entreq grounding unit, I doubt if you would get any benefit from lifting all grounds except the preamp, but without those units, I have always found great benefit, if you have good cheaters. Siltech used to make very nice ones but no longer. Synergistic Research at least used to take the cheap, gray cheaters you can get at Lowes or Home Depot and zap them on the Tesla coil. I had both and the zapped ones were clearly superior.
I am not using them with the HFC cables because the wall plugs fall out with the cheaters between them and the wall outlet. |
Almarg, as I've said before my city's electrical department seemed indifferent to removing the grounds. Their only concern was easily allowing the firemen to cut the house grounding to the grounding rod. They did not like the idea of welding the house ground to the ground rod. My insurance company also only wanted to avoid copper to aluminum connections.
I talked also to local tv stations that use arrays of grounds to their antenia. They said doing so was a benefit.
I can see if ones equipment was put together so poorly that a main cable was touching the chassis and one were standing in water or providing another path to ground that one might get a major shock. But multiple paths to ground sound so awful that one to like to lift the grounds.
The Tripoint and Enreq grounding units work great on the system grounds. |
