![]() I use a speaker binding post tied to the copper bus bar to hook component chassis to ground. In our old loft building-which, I'm grateful, is not coupled to the outside world with plastic plumbing pipes-we use a large-gauge copper wire banded securely to a cold-water pipe and linked directly to the ground connections in our dual-quad hospital-grade receptacles. If you live in a private home, that could be a composite ground rod driven deep into Mother Earth. There are products, like Mondial's MAGIC, that are designed to eliminate the ground loop on the cable while keeping the cable's impedance at the required 75 ohms, by the way. These two grounds are most likely at different potentials-hook 'em together and bzzzzzzzzz. Have you ever been startled by a hum when hooking up a video cable to an audio system? Once again, by law, the cable company has to "bond" to ground at the point of entry. Budding electrician though you may be, remember that neutral and ground should never be connected. (A partial explanation for why power cords, which each have a different filtering action on this noise, sound different?) DVD players and microprocessor-controlled turntables (of all things) are well-known offenders.Īnd how 'bout that class-AB amp you love so much? On musical peaks it might draw enough current to notch the top and bottom of the AC waveform, or even flatten the dickens out of it, leaving slim pickin's for the rest of the front-end to sup on. And there's noise riding on the power line, and even noise generated within your audiophile components, that feeds back through the power cord into the line. Ground is still ground, neutral still the AC return, but neutral gets pulled away from ground by loads from other household appliances, for example. But, ah-ha-a few feet away, they begin to diverge. Effectively, the center tap is neutral, and ground and neutral should be at the same potential at that point. But look at it this way: The center tap of the 220V input is "bonded" (by law) to ground at a building's main service input panel. What is ground? In theory it is the planet Earth, on which we all dwell. There's hot (supply) and neutral (return), the latter referenced to ground. Aside from walking on, what's it good for?įirst, a few basics. So let's consider that unruly beast called Ground. Of course, the "Fine Tunes" brief is low- or no-cost techniques for improving your system's sound. These new Wedges also offer several configurable ground-reference options for best performance. ![]() Since the two legs are 180 degrees out of phase, common-mode noise, which by definition will be the same on each leg, is canceled and you've got a balanced 110V supply. ![]() Filtering and isolation transformers with a center-tapped secondary referenced to ground yield a stable ☖0V per side. Naturally enough, he points to his own line of Power Wedge Ultras as better suited to the task at hand. When it comes to using step-down transformers, Les Edelberg of Audio Power Industries demurs. The Statpower is available from the West Marine catalog and retails for $699. It huge, puts out a thousand amps, and costs about $150." "Yep, it sounds great! It's enough to keep the system up for around half a day using a fairly serious battery called the Ultima. He's also experimenting with a Statpower Technologies Prosine 1000 Full Square Wave Converter hooked to a big mutha battery to power his front-end components. One thing you can do is take 220V down to 110V with a step-down transformer. The center-tap 110V supply is unbalanced, but if you take 220V service, you're getting balanced power. In the February installment of "Fine Tunes", we learned that typical domestic 110V AC supplies are derived from that 220V transformer out on the pole.
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