Grounding

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

Is there a consensus as to whether it is better to have either all your components grounded, or none of them (provided they operate safely without grounding)? 

 

What are other's experience? 

 

Thanks! 

[R1200CL]

https://translate.google.no/translate?hl=no&sl=no&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsenorc.no%2F%3Fp%3D226

 

If your equipment has ground, it’s there for a reason 😀

 

My amps comes with a warning not to use current cleaners etc., as some of them lacks earth. 

[PeterG]

I love my Nordost QKore/QBase setup--it's basically grounding in a box.  In addition to the components themselves, I use a Frey 2 power cord from the Base into the wall, standard power cords into the Base.  There are dedicated grounding cables from each component into the Kore 

 

The difference before and after with my system was dramatic--much better detail and imaging.  My understanding is that this is due to a sharp improvement in signal/noise. This was apparent immediately, and then repeated with everything I played thereafter.  It took my system to a different level.

 

The are a number of very positive reviews online for these, but I'd say the best thing to do is to borrow one from your local dealer for a few days. 

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

25 minutes ago, PeterG said:

I love my Nordost QKore/QBase setup--it's basically grounding in a box.  In addition to the components themselves, I use a Frey 2 power cord from the Base into the wall, standard power cords into the Base.  There are dedicated grounding cables from each component into the Kore 

 

The difference before and after with my system was dramatic--much better detail and imaging.  My understanding is that this is due to a sharp improvement in signal/noise. This was apparent immediately, and then repeated with everything I played thereafter.  It took my system to a different level.

 

The are a number of very positive reviews online for these, but I'd say the best thing to do is to borrow one from your local dealer for a few days. 

 

Just to be clear: your system is not connected to your home's ground wire, but to a ground box? 

 

Noob question, but if you do that and use equipment with a metal chassis connected to the ground wire within the equipment, is that not going to act like a giant antenna? 

[PeterG]

10 minutes ago, hopkins said:

 

Just to be clear: your system is not connected to your home's ground wire, but to a ground box? 

 

Correct, but I'm not a technical person, so just to be clear:  The QKore is a box with grounding material in it.  It's kind of like Grounding fo Dummies.  Each of my components and the QBase power strip are connected by ground wire to the QKore.  QBase is plugged into standard wall outlet via an upgraded power cord.  Just plug all this stuff together, and listen.

[Speedskater]

15 minutes ago, PeterG said:

The QKore is a box with grounding material in it.

It's kind of like Grounding fo Dummies.

How true, how true.

 

It's a non-functional waste of money.  It doesn't do any tasks at all.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

16 minutes ago, PeterG said:

  QBase is plugged into standard wall outlet via an upgraded power cord.  Just plug all this stuff together, and listen.

 

Sorry to insist, but your "QBase" is plugged into the wall outlet with a two-prong or three-prong plug ?

[Speedskater]

But back to the real question. There are two ground systems involved.  The Safety Ground/Protective Earth system and the connection to Planet Earth system.

In an audio system, it's best to have all the units Safety Ground/Protective Earth connected together with short AC cords. Do not add jumper wire to double insulated units (square in a square safety symbol.

Do not add any wires from the audio equipment to Planet Earth.

[PeterG]

1 hour ago, hopkins said:

 

Sorry to insist, but your "QBase" is plugged into the wall outlet with a two-prong or three-prong plug ?

No worries--QBase is plugged into the wall with a 3 prong plug.  QKore is not plugged in at all.  As I understand it in my "Dummies" way, the QKore pulls noise from your electronics via the grounding wires from Nordost, and separately pulls noise from your home electrical system via the QBase.  I'm pretty sure that these are independent, and that only the second one of these tasks requires the third prong.  

 

As to Speedskater's quip--Green Eggs and Ham was formative for me, so I have little sympathy for folks who sit in an armchair and declare that something does nothing before they have tried it.  But I was also skeptical before I tried it--my dealer urged me 3 times to just take it home and give it a go.  My advice to you was not to buy one, my advice was to try one.  If you think the difference is small or hard to notice or requires rigorous ABX comparison; I'd say it's not doing enough for the $ and you should just bring it back.  But if your ears/eyes pop open and you smile, it's worth every penny and you should buy it.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

Thanks. I'm not actually considering buying anything. Not even sure I even have a problem that needs fixing! 

 

I just want to understand what the alternatives are and what they entail. 

[Speedskater]

But I do have sympathy for those that do believe the century old misunderstanding about about AC power electricity and Planet Earth.

As for audiophile grounding boxes, well electricity is not at all interested in them.

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

9 hours ago, Speedskater said:

Do not add any wires from the audio equipment to Planet Earth.

 

I have no idea what you are referring to... 

[fas42]

Probably best to have no grounding, if that's how they were manufactured. I'm currently running a very simple, low cost setup with only two boxes in it; both are double insulated, meaning 2 prongs only, and they are only connected via an optical link. Instantly, a lot of interference issues vanish - because they've been designed out of the equation.

 

As soon as one component requires a safety earth, or there are connection between components which require a grounding, return conductor, things can start getting dirty, 😁. And the whole craziness of what people do in audio drops in - this can be sorted, but it requires fastidious attention to every area of how it's done - there are no magic recipes, which are easy to follow, which guarantee an optimum solution, every time.

[sandyk]

10 hours ago, Speedskater said:

How true, how true.

 

It's a non-functional waste of money.  It doesn't do any tasks at all.

 Except perhaps act as an antenna and pick up more RF/EMI which may make some lacking systems sound a little more "interesting"

 

[Qhwoeprktiyns]

I have a hybrid system:

- amplifier is grounded

- DAC is not

- for the source, i can potentially do either

 

Can this be problematic? 

[Audiophile Neuroscience]

Obviously if the component is meant to be grounded, as in connected to safety earth, it must be connected to safety earth. Some items are double insulated and are designed not to need the safety earth connection and they lack the third pin on the plug. It's the double insulation layer that provides the protection against electrocution. I'm not exactly sure why this is the case in domestic situations but for example I gather many toasters would fit into this category. Portable generators I gather should also be double insulated and that makes more sense to me given the circumstances of their use. However, once that double isolation is breached for some reason risk of electrocution occurs. Residual current devices that often form the "safety breaker" rely on connection to safety earth system which is both in place and functioning. In the case of generators you can get Residual Voltage Devices which work on a different principle. I have one of these for my portable Honda generator (which is double insulated).

 

I had an electrical engineer install a "technical earth" such is typically used in hospitals apparently.

 

The whole thing about common mode and differential mode noise rejection in audio, which end of the cable shielding to disconnect et cetera et cetera is better left to people like John Swenson @JohnSwenson and recognised (not anonymous Internet posters) others that know what they are talking about IMO

 

Basically, I would be very reticent to accept any advise (including from me) about grounding from other than qualified electrical engineers or at least people with a strong technical background at a professional level.

[fas42]

15 minutes ago, hopkins said:

I have a hybrid system:

- amplifier is grounded

- DAC is not

- for the source, i can potentially do either

 

Can this be problematic? 

 

My feeling here would be to make the amplifier ground the effective system ground; and have the source not grounded, that is, back to the household safety earth. But, provide an earthing link from the source across to the amplifier ground.

[sandyk]

11 hours ago, Speedskater said:

But back to the real question. There are two ground systems involved.  The Safety Ground/Protective Earth system and the connection to Planet Earth system.

In an audio system, it's best to have all the units Safety Ground/Protective Earth connected together with short AC cords. Do not add jumper wire to double insulated units (square in a square safety symbol.

Do not add any wires from the audio equipment to Planet Earth.

Nevertheless, John Swenson reported an audible advantage in many cases when earthing the 0 volts side of an  SMPS powered device.

I obtained an improvement with the audio from Coax Out of an STB by doing this, but used a 10 ohm earth as a direct earth appeared to  sound not quite as good, perhaps due to a minor earth loop, although still better than without it

[JohnSwenson]

OK since my name was mentioned, back into the fray again. First off there are several things called "ground' they are not all exactly the same thing, although somewhat inter-related.

1: AC mains side

2: signal side

 

#1 is all the 50/60HZ "wall socket" stuff

 

#2 is signal interconnects such a RCA audio cables, XLR interconnects, USB cables, Ethernet cables etc.

 

AC stuff

 

There are two primary grounds here:

Safety ground, otherwise known as the "third pin". I'm not an expert in other countries, but in the US this is a wire that is bonded to the neutral wire in the main electrical panel. This is supposed to be connected in the "components" to the outer case, its purpose is to trip the breaker in the electrical panel when a short occurs between the hot wire and case. This prevents YOU from making the connection to neutral. This circuit has to have a low enough resistance that enough current will flow to trip the breaker.

 

"Earthing", this is a connection to a ground rod or metal water pipe in the ground. Its other side is the neutral in the electrical panel.  Its purpose is to keep the overall voltage of the AC system in your house from getting too far away from anything that IS connected into the ground (such as water pipes, steal beams into the ground etc). Remember that the AC wiring in your house is connected to the secondary of a transformer (on the pole or underground), such a floating system can theoretically float hundreds of volts relative to ground. The earthing connection prevents that from happening. Earthing is not some magical thing. The connection is usually fairly high impedance, cannot support much current (unless you really work hard at it). It does not automatically "suck up" noise. This connection actually has little to do with noise etc. (except making it worse in some cases)

 

The safety ground is usually just a simple 12 AWG wire that wanders around from the electrical panel to your outlets. It may go through splices and connections before it gets to any particular outlet. There CAN (and almost always WILL be) voltages between the safety ground pin (third pin)  of one socket and another. Most of this comes from magnetic coupling from the neutral and hot wire and safety ground wire. You would think that the fields from the hot and neutral would cancel each other out, but this would take a completely symmetrical geometry of the cable, this very rarely happens.

 

This voltage between third pins can easily create 50/60Hz noise between components, commonly called "ground loops" . This post is not about how to fix such things, that is MUCH bigger than one post!

 

#2 is the "signal interconnects" These may or may not be connected to a safety ground connection. Various interconnects connect "signal ground" of different boxes. Noise can move from box to box over the signal grounds of boxes.

 

So how does 50/60Hz from #1 get to #2? There are two primary methods:

ground loops: mentioned above, the voltage difference between safety ground pins on different sockets.

 

leakage currents: These are small AC line frequency currents that go between the the AC line and the outputs of power supplies.

Leakage currents form loops either from PS outputs to a safety ground and then back to the neutral OR through another power supply. SMPS supplies have made this much worse than it was in the days of "transformer" supplies. Again how to fix this is WAY to big for this post.

 

So how do these "grounding boxes" fit into this? They have a wire going from a box into either a #1 or #2 ground. So what do they do? It has absolutely NO connection with ground AT ALL. They ARE in fact antennas as has been mentioned. BUT in some circumstances that CAN actually lower 50/60Hz noise in a system. Huh, how can that work? Remember that given a particular AC signal if it is added to another signal of the same frequency but opposite phase it cancels. What happens with these boxes is that most of what the antenna is picking up is the line frequency (50/60Hz), all that RF stuff is much lower in amplitude. IF you somehow get the phase of the signal coming out of the box to be opposite to the phase of the existing 50/60Hz in your ground system (from ground loops or leakage current) it will, at least to some degree, cancel out that existing noise.

 

My guess is that these "ground boxes" are antennas with phase shift networks of some sort. 

 

My personal opinion is that this is the wrong way to be going about fixing "grounding issues". If you change anything in the system then the carefully concocted "noise injection" will be different and it may wind up INCREASING the noise rather than helping. I personally prefer getting at the root of the problem and fixing ground loops and leakage issues directly rather than using carefully crafted band-aids.

 

Please note I did NOT say they can't work! Just that I don't think they are a good way to deal with the issues.

 

John S.

 

 

 

 

[Confused]

I have heard it said that "audiophile" grounding boxes such as the Entreq and similar are doing nothing more than acting as an antenna, which does make sense to me from a technical perspective.

 

I recall reading this below:

 

https://www.computeraudiodesign.com/gc1-ground-control/

 

In the text per the link above there is this statement "The Ground Control contains a mixture of materials that converts high frequency energy into heat."

 

Is this even possible? 

[ASRMichael]

I found this document useful to get my head around grounding. 

GroundingV6 (1).pdf

[Speedskater]

The above Russ Andrews paper is a mix of good stuff, stuff that needs a lot of editing (of errors) and totally wrong stuff.

[ASRMichael]

1 hour ago, Speedskater said:

The above Russ Andrews paper is a mix of good stuff, stuff that needs a lot of editing (of errors) and totally wrong stuff.

This is your 2nd post without elaborating further. You clearly know what you talking about, so how about you enlighten us who know much less than you? Would be appreciated 

[Tintinabulum]

John Swenson (whoever he is ;)) Explains elaborates a few points here-

https://uptoneaudio.com/pages/j-swenson-tech-corner

 

[fas42]

With regard to the original question, a simple way of understanding things is:

 

Grounding via the power plug is merely a safety mechanism,to stop you being electrocuted, etc, if metal areas of the case become live, through a fault.

 

Within the rig itself, every single part of the overall circuit that is supposed to be at 0 volts, should really, really be at 0 volts, no matter what! This is the hard part ... making sure that no matter what noise is floating around, or what currents are flowing, and no matter how high a frequency you're worried about, that this "perfect" reference point is actually that - as soon as one 0 volts is not really the same "0 volts" somewhere else, then you have a problem.