Tri-Planar grounding question...

Dogpile, my setup is balanced, but the wiring is identical up to the box in the cable. The Black wire is the shield up to the box and connects to the tone arm ground itself. After the box, the black wire breaks out to its own connection, and ties to the ground pin of the preamp at its input.

A while ago, I documented the conversion of a Tri-Planar from RCA termination to balanced XLR, for use with my Atma-Sphere MP-1 preamp.

The photos in this website might help you visualize the discussion above: http://www.galibierdesign.com/prd_triplanar_xlr_build.html.

Of particular interest, after this termination is complete, the braided shield you see will have electrical continuity from the tonearm's headshell, straight through to pin-1 on the XLR connectors.

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier

Atmasphere. I see where the black ground wire exits the box and have opened the box as well to see wire configuration.

The black ground wires which starts from the tonearm pillar DO break up within the box but also continues along the two L/R signal cables as well.

I can't unscrew the rca plugs for a peek since they have been wrapped with heatshrink.

Dogpile, the ground shield on Tri RCAs just ends before the it makes any physical contact with the RCA plug. It goes up as close as possible so the heatshrink has something subtstantial to shrink to so it makes a robust physical end that can be pluged and unpluged with out risking breaking the thin lead wires running up from the cartdrige. The fairly large RCA plug is not 'shielded' itself as the outside is the negative signal input. The RCA only has electrical connection with the plus and negitive connections from the cartdrige.

I used Thoms link to change my RCA to XLRs. (Thanks Thom, and for any body who may not know already, he is a great contributor to this board). Later I changed back to RCAs.

With the RCA setup the ground wire is connected to the shield at the box which is about 80% up from the cartdrige. With an XLR you can run a third wire into the XLR plug from the end of he shield for the ground which makes the already existing 'ground' lead redundant.

I hope that helps.
Terry