Why are there no high end cheater plugs?

Is a ground wire to the water pipe a better ground than the house ground to which the power cord ground is connected?

Brf, do you trust your interconnect shields to carry high voltage fault currents safely to ground? Pretty sure mine would explode with 2300V on them.

Reinforcing Ait's comment just above is the following statement on page 6 of this document by a noted expert on such matters, Bill Whitlock of Jensen Transformers:

Consider two devices connected by a signal cable, each device having a 3-prong ac plug. One device has a ground “lifter” on its ac plug and the other doesn’t. If a fault occurs in the “lifted” device, the fault current flows through the signal cable to get to the grounded device. It’s very likely that the cable will melt and burn! Defeating safety grounding is both dangerous and illegal - it also makes you legally liable!

I would add a couple of additional points. If the interconnect is single-ended, the shield or other return conductor of the cable will interconnect the circuit grounds of the two components. In many and I believe most designs circuit ground and chassis ground/AC safety ground are not connected directly together. Instead they are often connected together through a low value resistor (e.g., 10 ohms), or in some cases through a much higher impedance, or even not at all. Therefore if an insulation fault causes 120 volts or some other high voltage to be shorted to chassis, in any of those three cases not enough current may flow through the cable's shield or other return conductor to trip the breaker, even if a path to AC safety ground exists via the other connected component.

In the case of a balanced interconnection, depending on the design of the specific components the cable shield may be connected to chassis, but in many designs it will (incorrectly) be connected to circuit ground instead.

Geoff, re your question, see page 8 of the reference I linked to above. And note this statement: "If multiple ground rods are used, Code requires that they all MUST be bonded to the main utility power grounding electrode." Otherwise, as explained in the paper, safety hazards may arise from both equipment faults and lightning strikes. Also note the statement on page 3 that some engineers (incorrectly) "think that system noise can be improved experimentally by simply finding a “better” or “quieter” ground. Many indulge in wishful thinking that noise currents can somehow be skillfully directed to an earth ground, where they will disappear forever!" The quality of the earth ground of the AC distribution system is unrelated to grounding issues that may arise within the system, that may affect sonics.

Regards,
-- Al

Almarg, as I've said before my city's electrical department seemed indifferent to removing the grounds. Their only concern was easily allowing the firemen to cut the house grounding to the grounding rod. They did not like the idea of welding the house ground to the ground rod. My insurance company also only wanted to avoid copper to aluminum connections.

I talked also to local tv stations that use arrays of grounds to their antenia. They said doing so was a benefit.

I can see if ones equipment was put together so poorly that a main cable was touching the chassis and one were standing in water or providing another path to ground that one might get a major shock. But multiple paths to ground sound so awful that one to like to lift the grounds.

The Tripoint and Enreq grounding units work great on the system grounds.