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Cheap grounding solution

By chance I happened on a good use for disused power cords: Disconnect live and neutral leads at the power plug and connect them all to ground. Take off the IEC connector and terminate all to a single spade connector. On your DAC or preamp connect spade to grounding post or casing and insert power plags into a switched of mains socket, ideally on a different circuit. Alternatively terminate with RCAplug not connecting the centre pin and use spare RCA input on Pre or DAC I think you‘ll be pleasantly surprised about the increase in blackness, depth and height of soundstage as well as increased transparency. Total cost: zip squad diddely
antigrunge2
pauly
1,012 posts
 
I sort of do that already. I run off battery, and the battery/inverter does not have ground. The AC from my inverter goes into my balanced transformers. In order for my balanced transformers to work, I'm grounding them off a wall plug. 

I have been using regular 14 ga hookup wire and not a shielded cable as your post suggests. I'll grab one of my extension cables and see how well it works off a different breaker. I'm a little hesitant to hack up one of my good cables. 


antigrunge2 OP
1,367 posts
 
It all depends on how dirty or clean your local environment is: I live near two schools with 1500 pupils in the centre of London and get RFI/EMI by the boat load. Using unshielded cables anywhere near the power supply simply asks for ingress of such…
pauly
1,012 posts
 
If the overriding concern is EMI/RFI shielding, a polyethylene sleeve or wrap shielding an extension cord would a good option.

Any shielding that is grounded would simply transfer the noise on the shield to the ground conductor and be ineffective. Any proprietary design that introduces a capacitance across the conductors would also not be of value.

A "good" power cable would not necessarily be the optimal choice for this application, as they often have grounded shielding. 
antigrunge2 OP
1,367 posts
 
@pauly

actually no, as I said, cnnect all three leads (i.e. ground, live and neutral to the ground post on both ends, so your consideration doesn‘t come into it. The point is to provide a high capacitance link to the ground, shielding comes from the materials used to shield the conductors, not the ground part of the connection.
As I said,  I tried this and it worked beautifully
pauly
1,012 posts
 
actually no, as I said, cnnect all three leads (i.e. ground, live and neutral to the ground post on both ends,

I get that and don’t suggest otherwise. The three conductors in the cable acts as a single, lower gage conductor, lowering resistance.

The point is to provide a high capacitance link to the ground,
How does connecting the three wires create a “high capacitance link” to ground? It will lower the resistance, yes, create capacitance no. 

shielding comes from the materials used to shield the conductors, not the ground part of the connection.

Many cables’ ground conductor IS the shielding, meaning that on those cables connecting the three conductors will result in having no  shielding at all. 

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