HI everybody I have a small question to ask, been reading a lot about grounding products and their benefits but what I would like to know is that if a proper grounding is done in the traditional way like in the old days with a good copper rod installed in the correct manner in the Earth is it not a better way of grounding than having another box in the room however small and will it give the same benefit of the grounding boxes available ?
Grounding
- Thread starter jasbirnandra
- Start date
Without getting into grounding boxes, ground rods are there (mostly) for safety during major events like thunderstorms and power company high voltage accidents. The stake in the garden has nothing to do with day-to-day AC power quality. Mother Earth does not act as a sink or sump for bad electricity. That bad electricity is only interested in getting back to it's voltage source. It's voltage source being the power company Neutral.
Good engineering practice for grounding systems, both AC power and signal interconnects is well covered by experts like:
Keith Armstrong
Jim Brown
Ralph Morrison
Neal Muncy
Henry Ott
Bill Whitlock
Unfortunately it's Ralph Morrison that has the best system information. But little of his work is available on-line.
Keith Armstrong
Jim Brown
Ralph Morrison
Neal Muncy
Henry Ott
Bill Whitlock
Unfortunately it's Ralph Morrison that has the best system information. But little of his work is available on-line.
They lower the impedance between component grounds and provide piezoelectric ground filtering.
They aren't really grounding boxes. The only reasonable answer is they provide a drain for lower frequencies that radiate in a stereo area; while trying not to pick up RF.
They really are grounding boxes and they really work.
Grounding = Bonding = keeping various metal parts at the same potential. Reducing the impedance between parts reduces SCIN, shield current induced noise, and results in less noise. This is indisputable and the fact grounding boxes do this is also indisputable.
The question is whether it makes an audible difference in your system and whether boxes filled with relatively inexpensive piezo electric materials and simple ground cables are worth big $$$.
Grounding = Bonding = keeping various metal parts at the same potential. Reducing the impedance between parts reduces SCIN, shield current induced noise, and results in less noise. This is indisputable and the fact grounding boxes do this is also indisputable.
The question is whether it makes an audible difference in your system and whether boxes filled with relatively inexpensive piezo electric materials and simple ground cables are worth big $$$.
thats not true keith,
i wanted to get into the debate about these ground boxes, i have not got the equipment to perform a audio test but thought i would instead apply my efforts to disproving the heinous claim they contain kitty litter..
my garden is frequented by many felines, cats poo is a constant in my flower beds. so i chose to leave a ground box in the garden for a few days, with the lid off.
i can confirm no cats deposited their smelly loads in the days that past. this was disappointing as i would happily pay many $$$£££ to free my garden of cat poo. back to the drawing board!
however the special crystals did attract a deposit from a fox!!?? this was most pleasing as projecting the smell of fox feces makes me seem superior.
so keith, they are good for something!
Well, they aren't safety/earth grounding boxes anyway; which is was OP is saying. They do provide a return path, so a ground of sorts.
A quick definition for 'ground' is:: a common reference point.
I don't think that many of these boxes bond all the components to a common reference point.
A good solution would be a copper bus-bar terminal strip, with a flat copper braid to the chassis of each component.
What is a 'drain' and why would electricity be interested in it?
Some of the hook-ups (to RCA connectors) act as interference antennas.
That's exactly what the boxes do, some have a connection to safety ground (Tripoint), others do not (Entreq) but do provide a common point all components are grounded to, so they do reduce impedance between component grounds, same as the bus-bar terminal strip, but they also add piezo filtering. Tripoint looks exactly like Shunyata's implementation as far as I can tell...
In the photos, the terminals didn't appear to be bonded together. I thought that some of the boxes only had one terminal. In the other boxes are all the terminals connected together within a small fraction of an Ohm?
That's what it looked like to me, but obviously I don't how every one of them is done.
The graphs of with and without appear that they act something like a very inefficient version of a shield connected to one end of a cable for low frequencies. It's a guess still, but it appears that's how they work. The piezo material is presumably to stop them from being a huge RF antenna.
Well said Dave. I'll add, the more resolving your system is, the more you notice the effect of a cleaner signal ground.
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