Entreq Tellus grounding

spiritofmusic said:

Good point
I can put the Entreq on my Symposium rack and see what happens.
But my Entreq was also on the flr in London, so not much has changed.

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Concrete floor to Wooden suspended floor may just account for it.

Spirit , while you are at it ... Try the Everest screw on cap insteadof the wooden nut .

marty said:

Fascinating. It takes courage to write something like this, but take comfort, most of us have been there. I remember reading the comments of many going down the rabbit hole of some well known tweaks and cables, only to have a change of heart after long term listening, change of environment, change of gear, etc. Myself included. In fact, it's even more tragic than that sometimes. How many times have we put something in place and spent the evening singing its praise, only to listen the next day and exclaim "what the hell was I thinking"? To err is human, to be an audiophile is divine.

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Bravo Marty, beautifully put! Sometimes we pussyfoot around just chasing our own shadows trying to purfffect what was already great and just end up losing the very essence of what we were after in the first place. It’s so easy to start out simply chasing music only to then find we end up just listening to sounds instead. Anything that keeps us conscious of the sound tends to keep us away from the music as one is in parts and the other whole.

spiritofmusic said:

I may have been a bit hasty re my 180 on Entreq.
I’ve taken Taiko’s suggestion of isolating my S Tellus, not on Stacore platform, but spare shelf of my Symposium Isis rack, with some Precision Couplers as pucks to bypass the chassis fixed wooden footers.
I’ve also noticed that one of the wooden locking nuts on a grnd terminal has lost it’s thread and is not fully tightening the 2 Apollos situated there.
So I’ve moved my cdp Apollo to an Olympus Mini (that I was using to ground my S Cleanus which now goes ungrounded), and moved my 2 preamp Apollos to a secure grnd post on the S Tellus.
Some Entreq magic has returned, but I’m not going to draw any conclusions for at least 48hrs.
Initial impressions are of greater bass weight and deeper image. But this needs to not be at the expense of the agility and focus I got disconnecting the Entreq yesterday. In meantime I’m going to try and acquire a spare terminal nut that locks to be able to reuse this terminal.

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I have one loose post on my Poseidon, and need to use a needle nose pliers to grip the raised inner part of the post surface tightly to snug on the Everest knob, so I don't twist the inner connections.

I communicated with PO about this issue, and he is sending me careful instructions to properly tighten this post from the inside. so I would ask about what to do before you rip apart anything inside.

and good luck on the re-visit to the Entreq.

+1 on the Everest knob rec.....but first things first.

Just a further thought Marc.
If you were running 7/8 earth leads to the one Silver Tellus then you might well have been overloading it which could well have added to the effects of the wooden floor,
A reduced load on it and the cdp on the Olympus mini together with putting them on your stand may be restoring the Entreq magic.

Thanks Marc
It's not something I have pursued with him but 5 amps on one ST strikes me as quite a big demand but other members might be able to comment on my concern

spiritofmusic said:

Barry, we can draw two possible conclusions from what you say.
My previous room benefitted more from Entreq despite potential overloading (despite Fraser never highlighting issues running 8 components grounded 2 Apollos per terminal).
My new room is so much more transparent and low noise floor that Entreq truly is not as dramatic here.
I’ll know a bit more in a couple of days when the new configuration has had 48 hrs to bed in.
Early signs are positive, and I’ll stick with either cdp or preamp Apollos on the single terminal Olympus Mini, and the rest on the S Tellus, leaving S Cleanus ungrounded.

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Perhaps it is just me, but my perception of tweaks is opposite to yours - IMHO the better and more clean the system is sounding the more we notice their action and the more we find (or not) we need them. In my limited experience tweak classes, such as power cables, signal cables, feet or racks do not overlap in their action - you can not get with cables an effect similar to what you get with vibration type devices.

microstrip said:

Perhaps it is just me, but my perception of tweaks is opposite to yours - IMHO the better and more clean the system is sounding the more we notice their action and the more we find (or not) we need them. In my limited experience tweak classes, such as power cables, signal cables, feet or racks do not overlap in their action - you can not get with cables an effect similar to what you get with vibration type devices.

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+1.

the better sorted out and settled things are and the less system synergy issues and distortion there are, the greater the lift and higher the value....from tweaks. but sometimes tweaks find us at transitional points and we may or may not be ready for them to matter.

Marc, I interpret your recent path as one that is discovering more and more about your current environment. whereas you had lived in the previous one for awhile.....and bumped up against limitations. your new place is full of opportunities....and you are not at an end place where you are done sorting it out. so tweak relevance will be hit and miss since the reference is moving.

agree you are at a higher starting point, but you are not at that relative end game point where you are completely plugged into every nit.....yet. which is good news.....enjoy the ride.

Mike Lavigne said:

it's potentially a little tricky to do this effectively. you have likely already considered these variables; but just wanted to mention these in case it might be helpful.

depending on how your speaker terminals work, you may need to use a washer to shim the positive side of the speaker terminal so they tighten evenly......on my Cardas posts it was important. it's also important to make sure that the speaker cable spade is on the inside of the connection, and not the outside within the terminal. and also that the 2 ground cables used are identical in type and length.

and obviously if you only do one side, there will be negative aspects of imagining and frequency response if both sides are not mechanically identical.

however; every system is different. it most definitely paid dividends in my system. although I got a good benefit with the Poseidon only, when I added the 2 Atlantic Minimus units that jumped up the boost pretty good.

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Speaker terminal posts are separate. I have two pairs of speaker cables closer to the terminal base.

Only grounding right channel, imaging is better than without any grounding. Instruments are more 3D, vocal is in the center as before.

I really expect grounding 2 channels will be better than only grounding 1 channel, but it doesn't in my case. Probably no one has try only ground 1 channel vs both channels in a stereo amp.

Welcome back ... And the boxes respond to damping weights on top as well . So be like an isolation sandwich .

Mike Lavigne said:

I have one loose post on my Poseidon, and need to use a needle nose pliers to grip the raised inner part of the post surface tightly to snug on the Everest knob, so I don't twist the inner connections.

I communicated with PO about this issue, and he is sending me careful instructions to properly tighten this post from the inside. so I would ask about what to do before you rip apart anything inside.

and good luck on the re-visit to the Entreq.

+1 on the Everest knob rec.....but first things first.

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Me too I had the same. I realized that we should not tighten too hard with the knob (Everest or basic)

the sound of Tao said:

Bravo Marty, beautifully put! Sometimes we pussyfoot around just chasing our own shadows trying to purfffect what was already great and just end up losing the very essence of what we were after in the first place. It’s so easy to start out simply chasing music only to then find we end up just listening to sounds instead. Anything that keeps us conscious of the sound tends to keep us away from the music as one is in parts and the other whole.

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TOTALLY AGREE.
I prefer not to tell my own (and very recent) experience with Stillpoint, for not being publicly like a fool.

spiritofmusic said:

Jazz, we have Taiko and Barry to thank, for suggesting getting the S Tellus off the flr and spreading the grounding to my O Mini.
I’m REALLY not getting how putting a box filled w inert materials on a rack can make a difference

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Hi Marc,

Generally speaking I would say its a general lack of understanding on how these products work. As an example, we all know you need higher powered amplifiers to driver lower sensitivity speakers, therefor you wont be surprised you will get pretty poor results from powering an Apogee Scintilla from a 45 SET amp, but if you simply didn't know you would call either a subpar product.

To name another example more specific towards your situation. I have spend a lot of time experimenting with active vibration platforms. They have a maximum range inside which they are able to counter react to vibrations, dictated by maximum motor excursion. Placing an active vibration platform on a wooden shelf is possible but there are limitations. For a shelf width of 1 meter it already needs to be 50mm/2" thick, and a very rigid hard wood. For a 2 meter shelf width this already needs to be 100mm/4" thick! And in these tests these shelves are sitting on a solid concrete floor. Now extrapolate this to a suspended wooden floor with an even larger span and you can see how this will simply not work as the movement of the floor will be several times bigger then the maximum possible applied correction by the platform motors.

Now this box filled with inert materials is not as "inert" as you would think. As I said before these materials are piezoelectric. In fact a lot of components used in your system possess piezoelectric properties.

Quoting from Wikipedia: "Piezoelectricity /pi?e?zo??il?k?tr?s?ti/ is the electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials (such as crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA and various proteins)[1] in response to applied mechanical stress. The word piezoelectricity means electricity resulting from pressure and heat.

I am probably stating the obvious here but vibrations are equivalent to applied mechanical stress. To get good results from your piezoelectric boxes you need to reduce the amount of applied mechanical stress. Now to take this a step further, the lower the frequencies involved the larger the potential mechanical stress. Every structure has a self resonance point, at this point the amplitude of applied stress will actually be amplified! An example is tapping a tuning fork, the zinggggggggg you'll here is its self resonance point. Above that frequency there can be an amount of damping / isolation, but below that point everything simply "passes through" uninhibited. You can lower this point usually by increasing the structures mass or stiffness. A concrete floor should be superior to a wooden floor in both mass and stiffness, its self resonance point is usually below 10 Hz, for a suspended wooden floor this would typically be much higher meaning significant low frequency energy!

Thank you Taiko for such a helpful and informative post.
It has certainly improved my understanding of racks in general and, in particular, the design and operation of my Entreq Athena racks