Puma Cat
Well-known member
No, I don't have a Shunyata Altaira Chassis Ground hub, but I plan on getting one when available. I very briefly had an early Altaira prototype in-house for beta-testing back in 2020, but I had to send that unit on to another beta-tester after only about 2 weeks. That other beta-tester had components with more sophisticated "built-in" grounding system, so it was important for him to test it extensively from that circuit topology perspective. To be honest, I don't remember if that prototype was the Chassis Ground hub or Signal Ground hub version as it was about 2 years ago.
What I did do recently, though, was to connect a Shunyata Venom CGC spade ground cable to the screw-down chassis terminal screw on the front of my UpTone Audio EtherREGEN to one of the GP-NR ground posts of my Everest and was gobsmacked at the level of improvement that resulted. Then, I connected another Shunyata Venom CGC ground cable with an RCA plug on the component end to the S/PDIF terminal of my Baltic 3 DAC and the spade end to another ground post of the GP-NR of my Everest, and got yet an another, equal degree of improvement in the reduction of the noise floor. The improvement from connecting both these cables to establish a chassis ground connections from both the EtherREGEN and Baltic 3 to the GP-NR system of Everest was fairly startling: a notably quieter noise floor, more transparency and clarity for reproduction of instrumental and vocals, greater and more full-bodied tonal density and finer articulation of timbre, as well as improved imaging and soundstaging: specificially more solidly-defined and stable images, with more finely articulated layering of instrument and vocals in the oundstage and improved "vapor trail" of decay.
And most notably, it imparts a really nice sense of what I could call "listening ease" to the presentation. I think Hans uses the term "relaxed" to mean the same thing.
The GP-NR system of Shunyata power distributors was put there for a reason, and Man! It really works. Frankly, I'm surprised more people don't use it.
Cheers, Dev.
