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Cassis Grounding Solution

I meant "Chassis" in the heading above.  Sorry for the error.  System will not allow edit.

I use a pair of Tara Labs Zero Evolution balanced interconnect cables. These use a HFX Floating Ground Station to drain noise. A pair of drain wires is run from the cables to the HFX. Another drain wire is meant to connect to a component chassis.

https://www.taralabs.com/hfx

My components have no visible fasteners or ground lug to which I might use as the recommended termination point for the ground wire.

A friend suggested the following solution. I bought a StaticTek Banana Jack Outlet Adapter:

https://www.amazon.com/StaticTek-Adapter-Universal-Connection-Unbreakable/dp/B071J61CSV/ref=sr_1_3?c...

The Tara mini banana plug is 2mm. The StaticTek accepts only a 4 mm plug. I bought a 2mm banana jack female to 4mm banana jack male plug probe:

https://www.amazon.com/copper-Banana-Female-4mm-Probes/dp/B01JEEMQNQ/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keyword...

This arrangement made for a tight secure fit into the gound of the AC outlet receptacle.

This may work with grounding needs other than mine is why I posted this.




kodak805
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,764 posts
 
There is a standard for balanced line connections. It is called AES48 (Audio Engineering Society file 48). You don't need at that grounding stuff; the shield is supposed to be tied to pin 1 of the XLR connection.


If everything is in conformance, there isn't any noise. This is because the audio signal does not reference ground, so if there's a ground loop nothing happens.

Did this hookup make any difference (change in the noise floor)?


kodak805 OP
74 posts
 
Thank you for your comments.  I do not disagree with how balanced cable grounds are commonly configured.

Tara Labs employs a different approach.  The cable shield is floating and requires the HFX unit and both cables drain wires connected together at the opposite end to complete the circuit. The drain wire lead from the HFX then dumps any residual noise left over from the Ceralex compound in the HFX into the external ground, in this case, the wall AC receptacle.

My system is extremely quiet without this arrangement. I am merely complying with the requirements of the Tara Labs' wide bandwidth design.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
11,764 posts
 
A customer of mine had Tara Labs cables. I'm familiar with them.

Our preamp was the first balanced line preamp offered for home audio use. Put another way, we introduced balanced line operation to high end audio, way back in 1989.


If you follow all the tenants of the balanced line standard, you wind up with low noise and wide bandwidth; this allows for cable lengths that can be hundreds of feet long with no degradation, even of a microphone signal (in fact, this is what ushered in the age of high fidelity in the early 1950s, and the same technology made transcontinental phone calls possible)). Further, no ground loops and extreme immunity to interconnect cable artifact. That is what the balanced line system is for.
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