Mike L ,
Palm Beach..! So we're practically neighbors ...
BTW, could you tell us more about the Gnd scheme used in your setup and how much did it play into lifting your sound Q ..
regards
yes, 'almost neighbors' for 60 hours.....meetings all morning into early afternoon, dinners all evenings.....so much fun.
the grounding scheme in my system beyond the normal power grid grounding with my Equi=tech 10WQ isolation transformer wall panel which has it's own ground rod, consists of three boxes; the Entreq Silver Tellus for signal path grounding for my darTZeel preamp (and digital if possible), the Tripoint Troy Signature for chassis grounding for all my front end gear, and the Entreq Poseidon for grounding the negative terminals on my dart 458 mono block amplifiers, and for grounding the 2 plate amps on the bass towers of my MM7 speaker system. also; for my digital Lampi Golden Gate I use Tara Labs Grandmaster Evolution w/HRX RCA interconnects dual mono block grounding pods. the jackets of these cables are grounded both to a special box as well as to the GG chassis and to the Tripoint Troy as well.
all this is part of the performance picture. and my perspective is that 'uber' grounding with these additional boxes is something you do with a fully sorted out mature system where you are looking to take things a little further. you have already dealt with system chaos and feel things are pretty well synergized. throwing grounding products into the mix too soon is maybe too confusing as to what is doing what.
anyway what Bonzo mentions is described as follows......
it's the little thing I did with the plate amps on my speaker bass towers which seemed to help send things over-the-top recently. each active bass tower of my speakers has -4- 15" subwoofers and -2- 1000 watt amplifiers. one amp for every 2 drivers. since the Entreq Poseidon has three separate boxes and I was only using 2 of them for my dart amps, and there was nothing else to ground in that part of my room, I figured I should see if grounding those bass amps might yield some benefit. the problem is getting ground hookup on the amps. I called my speaker designer to find out which plate screw would have the highest probability of being useful for this approach.....which he told me and, btw, he would not be surprised that there would be a benefit to this idea in a low noise system like mine. I then acquired from Tara Labs additional tiny grounding Keys which allow you to get 'purchase' into a screw hole and also some small pure copper grounding cables which I hooked up to the plate amps and then connected to the Entreq cables. this was a total hail mary try with minimal expense. but something magical happened. the speakers seemed to disappear more. maybe the straw that tipped things over? I don't know. but combined with some other speaker placement adjustments and listening position adjustments the system went to another level......which then you can read Bonzo's perceptions.
as far as fitting my overall grounding approach into the larger performance equation, I would first say that the lower the noise floor of your system to begin with, the greater potential you have for a significant delta of improvement from grounding. I happen to have super low noise due to many factors; my room is a room within a room in a barn separate from my home in the middle of a 5 acre parcel in the mountains away from the city. it's friggen quiet. and I mean zero noise. then I use the Equi-tech 10kwa isolation transformer to eliminate power grid noise. then all the Furutech NCF outlets and plugs. the darTZeel solid state is super quiet, with minimal parts count in the signal path and battery power for my preamp and phono stages.
with all these low noise efforts, every small increment of lower noise and increased dynamics yields benefits. so when you do this little thing over here, there is no place for the result to hide. and as a result every step forward with these grounding products has brought more musical communication to the equation. I could go on and on about what has happened as I added each level of grounding.
I will only say that the Tripoint Troy Signature was the most 'holy sh*t' what the hell happened? product I have heard with grounding and it is much more of a difference maker in terms of degree of change than the Entreq......which is more subtle. until this last little thing I did which I'm still mystified at to why it had such an effect.
let's say on the other hand that you are in the city with considerable background noise, you are in an apartment building with a noisy power grid, and you use tube amps and preamps.
the degree of effect of things will be different. small improvements get lost in the background noise. I'm not criticizing tube gear, only the relative benefits of grounding efforts and where it has the most benefit and why.
