Dedicated line questions

Greysquirrel, regarding your question about "star" and dedicated grounding, the way I got there, was to hire an electrical contractor who had done quite a lot of commercial work, so the wiring I asked for was not unusual, due to his experience with computer rooms and hi tech electronic assembly areas. The "star grounding" method is not strictly legal in our city, as the local electrical code here asks that ALL the grounds be tied together at the electrical box. What I have done, and suggest for you, actually exceeds this code, because it offers safer, multiple grounds. However, because it does not "precisely fit" the rules, is not always easy to hire a professional electrician to get it done. For Star grounding to work, each dedicated run for the audio system must be in PVC, or no conduit at all. The traditional metal outlet housings and metal conduit used in electrical work, automatically tie all the grounds together, back to the electrical panel. DO NOT connect your stereo's dedicated outlets to the main or sub electrical panel. Instead, a SEPARATE ground must be run from each of the stereo's Hubbell computer grade outlets, to the star grounding system. This star system consists of a superior ground plain, that plain requires three copper rods deep in the ground outside of your house (8 ft. or longer, each). This triple ground plain is tied together, and then tied to a single bar under the house. ALL of the stereo's separate TNN wire runs from the individual dedicated circuits tie to that single bar. The purpose of this scheme is so the stereo does not share its ground plane with the remainder of the house's electrical panel. This removes all the ground noise generated from appliances, motors, TV, air conditioning, computers, and other electrical appliances in your home that normally get into your system. The noise floor drops tremendously! If you want to go even farther, have a separate eight gauge copper run pulled from the drop, and run that to a 100 amp 220V panel, and from there you can run Hubbell twist lock 220V outlets to use with high end amps that are capable of running in either 220V or 110V. The Hubbell twist locks can be "split" into two 110V, or run as a single 220V. Barring that, the option of running single Hubbells, as all of us have suggested on this posting, is a superb choice. If you choose to use the method I suggest, and you later add additional dedicated outlets to your stereo, the bar under the house is ready to be tapped into, where the other stereo grounds already reside. This is nice, as it keeps all the "star" grounds in the stereo together and ready for future upgrades.

I´ve found an improvement over bare wire connection (connecting the lines to breakers and main blade switches using cable terminals.(tin plated for less maintenance or pure copper that will require corrosion cleaning). You can use larger than nominal cable awg terminal and make a small loop of the stripped cable, put it inside the terminal and solder it very well. You have this way far more contact area and solder all over the cable surface. I used lead free solder with silver content. The flat surface of the cable terminal providesa very good contact with the bolt and flat metal underneath it. Or simpler maximize the bare wire contact by using the loop trick. Picky I know but it´s been good for me.

Sorry Greysquirrel, but the mainline wire really is directional. Redkiwi suggested it, and so I tried it myself and got the differences in direction as noted in my above post. Albert Porter covered grounding better than I could. My electricians just grounded the sub-main panel that had my four dedicated lines into it, and as I understand it, the closer ther better, but closeness of grounding is not necessary. It's hard to separate the effects of the grounding versus the dedicated lines-- it all works together, ie I did not try them separately, but I got greatly lowered noise floor with the whole system. Re: directionality, I was able to run the main wire outside the wall to check directionality before final installation through the attic, eg I ran wire from the main to submain and then listened to each direction. Good Luck. Craig.

Hi Korn. Albertporter has covered the ground arrangement. I have found that the results vary. In one case we found a dramatic reduction in noise, and an improvement that was more significant than the dedicated AC feed. In another case we heard NO difference at all by putting a dedicated earth in. Don't risk getting the directionality wrong or you will be disappointed in the results of your efforts and investment. As Garfish suggests - get enough AC feeder cable to do the job and then just run it from your board through your house or outside (ie. not installed in the walls just yet) and listen to what it does. Then run it the other way. There will be a difference. I have found that one manufacturer's product sounds better when run in the same direction as the writing on the outer of the cable, while anothers' sounds better in the opposite direction to the writing. You have actually got quite a lot of useful information in the above posts if you read them carefully, and all of it gels with my experience. Beware that the end result will cause your system to become a lot more lively and will much more transparently reveal any problems in your components. I am sceptical at Audiowhore's suggestion that the PS Audio makes the AC feed irrelevant. I have not tried a PS Audio unit but the comments I have heard indicate to me that it suffers at least some of the problems of all filters - ie. that it is a trade-off between lower noise floor and compressed dynamics. With a dedicated AC feed and good power cords, I find the benefits of a filter are small and the downsides are unacceptable. When PS Audio have a 240V version I will give it a try.

The PS Audio power plant does a pretty good job at making dedicated power irrevelant (although I must admit that I havn't tried my system with dedicated power to compare it to the power plant). One thing that it does _not_ make irrevalent is a dedicated ground. By US law (I dunno about other countries), it cannot touch the ground. But you can disconnect the unit's ground from the house ground, and use your own instead. It would be very unfortunate to unhook the unit's ground and not have a seperate ground :). Another advantage to the PS audio power plant is that you can increase the cycle rate from 50/60 Hz up to 120 Hz. For my setup, I noticed a slight improvement bumping it up to 85-90Hz, and degridation after that point. Redkiwi: I've only noticed better dynamics with this. Dynamics could be compressed if you, say, used an amp that uses more peak watts than the PS device can produce. For front end gear, the peak current isn't too much higher than normal current, so it would probably be OK. BTW, they do have an export version which puts out 220 or 240V (but it's a bit more expensive than the 117V version). The PS Audio web page is excellent, and Paul McGowan (the designer) is very helpful answering questions. And no, I do not work for PS Audio :).