Entreq ground conditioners - what's the theory?

The Entreq appears to be a sink for stray voltage that is floating around on your component’s chassis and ground planes .. it might be using magnets or ceramics to provide a low impedance sink and path way for this stray voltage on the chassis to migrate to as it may be of lower impedance than the ground rod lies at ... ideally you would like your ground rod to be at 5 ohms or less but they can trend as high as 25 ohms of resistance

Generally the dryer the soil the higher the impedance (resistance) .. Texas, Arizona, and Nevada would come to mind ...

The higher the water table and moister content of the soil ... the lower the impedance due to better conduction in the moist soil

You can have a licensed electrician come out and preform a “Soil Resistivity” test to determine the impedance of the ground system

Voltage/Noise couples to the chassis and it’s ground planes and if the impedance at the ground rod is high enough the stray voltage will see the Entreq’s lower impedance and migrate down that path way

Electrical current has no loyalty ... it’s not very monogamous ... and will always travel down the path of least resistance as opposed to going where we intended it to travel

I see two factors which can contribute to the effectiveness of the Entreq and why some have success and others don’t

First is the impedance that your ground rod lies at .....

If it is equal to or lower than the Entreq sink impedance ... the stray voltage may see the ground rod as the lower impedance and migrate to it .. in which case the Enteq would seem relatively ineffective providing little to no improvement

How ever if the ground rod has a very high impedance due to dry conditions then the stray voltage will see the Entreq as the lower impedance and migrate to it ... in this case the Entreq will provide an audible improvement by lowering the noise floor

But wait a minute the ground wire is the third wire safety which is only there to provide a low impedance pathway for a fault (dead short) to travel on until the breaker trips ... it does not lie in the signal path nor is there any musical content on it ... Hmmm ???

It’s seems our equipment have two ground planes in them .. one is the Safety Ground for our protection and has nothing to do with the musical content and the other is the Signal Ground plane which I don’t believe is really a ground plane but the return leg for the audio signal

The return leg needs to be referenced to Zero volts so they tie the Signal Ground to the Equipment Safety ground for referencing assuming the safety ground was at Zero volts ... unfortunately it’s not and there is stray voltage on it and the metal chassis and because they reference or tie the signal return/ground plane to the Safety ground the stray voltage on the safety wire will loop back into the signal return/ground plane adding noise to the original signal ... besides not being loyal or monogamous electricity travels in loops and this is how the voltage (noise) travelling on the chassis and ground plane loops back into the signal and is presented as noise

By providing an alternate lower impedance pathway ... the stray voltage migrates to the Entreq instead of looping and coupling into the signal return/ground plan ... less stray voltage on the signal means lower noise floor

But wait ... there is a hitch .. some equipment have separate dedicated pathways for the Ground Safety circuit and the Signal Return/Ground plane circuit ... they are not connected or tied together so there is no way to for the stray voltage (noise) to migrate into the signal as noise riding on the line .. here the Entreq would have no effect as there is no connection between the Stray voltage floating on the chassis and ground planes and the Signal Return/ground plane

If your component has a separate Signal and Safety Ground plane .. like my Ayre does .. the Entreq will not help as the stray voltage can’t loop or migrate into the signal plane ... if your component has both planes tied together for reference then the Entreq can help

If your ground rod lies at a high impedance then the Entreq can help

So if your signal and ground plane are tied and your ground rod has high impedance this is where the Entreq brings the most improvement .. other combination become less effective

This may account for the mixed reviews and all the .. it does vs It doesn't .. because it will and it won’t .. ;-)
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Jfrech: I think Spirit is basically right, but what I'm seeing that the difference amounts to is the distinction between the traditional "power conditioning" we're so far familiar with and this emerging new field of "electronic noise reduction" - similar, but different. Traditional power conditioning evolved from simple designs usually involving the more basic ingredients for filtering like caps and chokes and so on - good, but they can have their limitations...the technical side of which I will spare you, but everyone has had to deal with the downsides to power conditioning - inconsistencies in performance due to various conditions or factors - things like: time-of-day or weather and seasonal changes, voltage irregularities (here you could talk about AC regeneration, but surprisingly it's just as vulnerable to these changing factors as anything else is). But, most of all and particularly familiar to those of us who've kept some kind of tabs on user reports on power conditioners - there can be some sort of infringement on the sonic performance of the system...some loss of bass, or treble or dynamics...that tends to pop up with a somewhat disturbing degree of regularity in almost any thread on the subject, do they not? Look at Spirit's own direct experience with his Burmester. The inference is that there all kinds of conditioning out there, some good, some great...and some, in the end, not so great. So how much do you really have to know to market a conditioning product? How many makers out there are the real thing and how many are just pretenders? Hard to say, but the fact is that anything less than a completely successful conditioner (i.e. one that plainly improves the sound quality and without compromising it at the same time) is liable to be seen as an unfortunate investment, regardless of price. But, what I'm trying to get at here is that I think we're more or less on the verge of a paradigm shift and that "electrical noise reduction" represents the next step. In its new form, apart from traditional power conditioning, you might recognize it by its inclusion of some form or another of quantum physics (on which I'm basically next to clueless so far) that will likely involve proprietary materials and, increasingly, an absence of any of the traditional parts like caps, diodes, resistors, chips, etc. For Alan's part, he has said all of the products he makes do only one thing: reduce electrical noise. I own thousands of dollar's worth of his stuff, but I've not yet heard any of it to introduce anything I could interpret as a negative impact on the sound...all utterly without adverse effect. But, he says he does not own an "audio" company because this sort of technology has applications everywhere. I even have it in my car. It's applied to the car's computer. For $60 I now get 50 extra miles per tankful. That same amount of fuel savings applies to any car in the world (that has a CPU). Imagine what the world impact would be if you could just flip a switch, and instantly every car in world had this simple technology installed. What would that do overnight for world economies? There are endless applications for this kind of thing: aeronautics, medical imaging, computers, communications - everywhere there is an electrical circuit there is virtually the possibility of an app for it. One of the things Alan has done with all this is a very sophisticated level of manipulating ohm's law in a way that reduces resistance. Up to now, the only way to do that has been through selective use of metalurgy. This is different. This is innovation. Not only has he found a way to this in a component, but in the whole home. It consumes little or no electricity from the wall, so it's utterly green. I even save money on my power bill. And it reduces all forms of EMI/RFI, in the in-wall wiring, in the components and in the air in the home - which brings with it health benefits for allergy suferers (like Alan) and those who suffer from auto-immune diseases. FWIW, Alan Maher has flown under a lot of people's radar so far, but I think that may begin to change in just the next few years. If he were publicly traded, I believe I would be buying his stock. I also think he (with help from his investors) is going to one busy dude for a while...a long while. That's one reason why I sound like a perpetual Alan Maher commercial any more...it's not that I just like saying the guy's name or anything, it's the endless innovation that seems to be coming, both for A/V and for everything else. Keep your eye on that guy, he just may end up being one of those special people in history who changes the world. Or, if you like, as Spirit says: "...I'll never go down the conditioning/filtering route again". I'm thinking that before it's all said and done an awful lot of hifi people may well be saying the same thing. Alan certainly won't be alone, there will be the Entreqs, the Tripoints and the rest, I'm sure, but I suspect in one respect or another, they will be struggling to catch up to where he is now...let alone where he will be... Jfrech: do I think the Entreq will not be that much of an improvement over your Shunyata? Somehow, I don't think so...from both what I believe and from what Spirit is saying... (An even longer post...oy vey...)

Davehrab: good post. Glad to see someone with more ee experience chiming in. All extremely interesting and useful.

Ivan...thanks for taking the time to write this. So I have a friend getting a demo of the Entreq...he'll bring it by my home (might be 6-8 weeks)...only way is to try this...i'm sincerely curious...

Ivan thanks for the kind words but unfortunately I’m am not an EE or even a lab assistant ... as a matter of fact in high school I was so poor in math that I thought that Calculus was Julius Caesar's hair dresser
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