Try shaking a magic chicken’s foot at it. You will be truly impressed. Even more than having boutique fuses.
Lowering House Grounding Impedance
So, I’ve finally gotten to a place where I’m pretty happy with the pieces of gear in my system. I know, I’m surprised too. Recently, however, I read about lowering the impedance to ground as a potential improvement and thought I’d give it a try. I’ve done quite a bit of tweaking to get to where I’m finally happy but I had never really looked at the grounding situation for my house, other than to make sure the utility panel was tidy and connected up right. In reviewing my house’s grounding to earth situation, I found that it didn’t have one! My house was built more than 50 years ago and they relied on grounding to the cold water pipes. This was fine while there was 100 feet of 3 inch copper pipe running to my well but when we replaced that pipe with plastic my grounding was gone. Initially, I drove two 8 foot copper clad grounding rods and bonded them together and grounded the external utility panel to them. I was really surprised that the difference the good grounding made to my system, it really removed a layer of haze that I didn’t know was there. Like cleaning a window that is already fairly clean, just added clarity. As I understand it, the lowering of the ground potential is what is responsible for the increase in sound quality. Has, anyone else experimented with improving their ground situation?
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I have. I added a clean ground to my system, rather than use the house ground. I was amazed at how clean FM reception became. I had two FM tuners, one analog and the other digital but both improved significantly. Not only was it cleaner, the music was more coherent as well. I did not hear any improvement on the other sources though. |
spatialking95 posts12-05-2018 11:19pmNot sure why the isolated earth ground connection would increase the reception. I would suggest lifting the isolated ground entirely and listen for any changes one way or the other. My guess is you won’t hear any difference . As for the electrical safety aspect of the isolated earthed electrode you have now you do not have a low resistive path for ground fault current to return to the source in the event of a hot line to chassis fault. You also have a greater chance of a nearby lightning strike transient interring on the isolated earth electrode and damaging your audio equipment. If you want to experiment with a separate earthed ground rod and still meet electrical safety code you can but it must be connected to the branch circuit equipment grounding conductor. The branch circuit equipment grounding conductor must not be lifted from the source electrical panel equipment ground bar. The NEC calls this grounding electrode an "Auxiliary Grounding Electrode". 2017 NEC 250.54.... I would not recommend it though. It just adds another path for a near by lightning high voltage transient not to mention more mother earth noise on your audio equipment. If you think you need a better connection to mother earth for lightning protection, there in a lower soil resistance, (IEEE recommends 5 ohms or less), you can drive as many ground rods as you want. That is providing they all tie together with a minimum copper wire size of #6awg and then is connected, bonded, to the electrical service entrance neutral conductor. The same point as the existing grounding electrode conductor that is connected to earth. Jim |
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