DT, you are not quite clear to me: Generally a dedicated line starts from the grid of your home directly to your listening area and is used for nothing else, but your gear. It also has separate fuses, best those old fashioned ones, which need replacement, once they have blown. These lines take their ground generally from the grid and in many countries the electrician is bound by regulations and law how to do this.
If I were in your shoes, I would start with this setup, plug in the gear according to the manufacturer's instructions ( generally grounded ) and just listen. If there is hum, you have a ground loop somewhere. To combat this, you have to experiment. Sometimes you have to remove the grounding from a specific piece of equipment ( but careful, sometimes the manufacturer insists, that the unit be grounded ), sometimes you have to run a piece of grounding wire, say between a recordplayer and your preamp. There are no fast and ready rules, its a matter of trial and error. Sometimes you have to use a cheater plug, to reverse neutral and hot. If you are not familiar with tweaking powerlines and plugs, I would let a knowledgeable person do this. (Shock and fire hazard, brown outs )
Star grounding means, I think, that you ground one appliance in your system, generally the preamp/linestage, let the rest of the system "float", which means that your remove their individual grounding by say cheater plugs and in a last step, connect that equipment via grounding wires to your preamp, which you did not float. In other words, all of your gear is grounded at just one point. In theory this is easy, the practice is difficult, the benefits not always as expected. Besides, if you have a dedicated line and you plug in your gear just in there, there is a common ground to all of them anyway.
I am not a technical person, I'm talking out of experience so please wait for more knowledgeable posts on this topic. When I ran my dedicated lines, I took the grounding from the main grid and listened happily ever after.
Good luck DT!
What you could discuss with your electrician is the quality of your existing ground. He will know, that there are different ways of gounding withing the existing regulations:
Grounding from the grid, grounding to the heating (risky, because these days plumbing is only partly metal, often plastic and hence useless, grounding in running a dedicated copper rod deep into the earth. Sonic differences are slight if at all, using the normal gound from the grid is probably your best bet.
If I were in your shoes, I would start with this setup, plug in the gear according to the manufacturer's instructions ( generally grounded ) and just listen. If there is hum, you have a ground loop somewhere. To combat this, you have to experiment. Sometimes you have to remove the grounding from a specific piece of equipment ( but careful, sometimes the manufacturer insists, that the unit be grounded ), sometimes you have to run a piece of grounding wire, say between a recordplayer and your preamp. There are no fast and ready rules, its a matter of trial and error. Sometimes you have to use a cheater plug, to reverse neutral and hot. If you are not familiar with tweaking powerlines and plugs, I would let a knowledgeable person do this. (Shock and fire hazard, brown outs )
Star grounding means, I think, that you ground one appliance in your system, generally the preamp/linestage, let the rest of the system "float", which means that your remove their individual grounding by say cheater plugs and in a last step, connect that equipment via grounding wires to your preamp, which you did not float. In other words, all of your gear is grounded at just one point. In theory this is easy, the practice is difficult, the benefits not always as expected. Besides, if you have a dedicated line and you plug in your gear just in there, there is a common ground to all of them anyway.
I am not a technical person, I'm talking out of experience so please wait for more knowledgeable posts on this topic. When I ran my dedicated lines, I took the grounding from the main grid and listened happily ever after.
Good luck DT!
What you could discuss with your electrician is the quality of your existing ground. He will know, that there are different ways of gounding withing the existing regulations:
Grounding from the grid, grounding to the heating (risky, because these days plumbing is only partly metal, often plastic and hence useless, grounding in running a dedicated copper rod deep into the earth. Sonic differences are slight if at all, using the normal gound from the grid is probably your best bet.