What constitutes a grounding box?

[Macca]

looks like obsidian cuttings(waste product) and probably is, with some cheap quartz on top. a bit of copper to stop it all moving about too much. a cheap as chips pine box. only one connector too so yo will need several.

Some say the black stuff is magnetite.

[struth]

Some say the black stuff is magnetite.

it is very much attracted to a magnet so easy to find out. I bet its obsidian tho. cheap as chips as it comes from lava and there's plenty around. Very sharp and often used by surgeons as its even sharper than steel scalpels.got a few big bits in house. Buried the wife with a bit of heart shaped obsidian, as she loved her stones.

[Wakefield Turntables]

Jerry's getting one from China for a tenner though. Or something like that.


Copper is quite pricey now though isn't it? And there seems to be quite a lot of it in those boxes pictured above.

Yes but not several grands worth, this is what several grand will by copper wise... http://scrapmetalreaders.co.uk/scrap-metal-prices/

[Macca]

Yes but not several grands worth, this is what several grand will by copper wise... http://scrapmetalreaders.co.uk/scrap-metal-prices/

Fair point.

[Pharos]

I'd be amazed if it really does improve sound, and DBTs are necessary with 0.1dB matching of levels which shouldn't be hard to do.

Much as I want to be open to a new tweek that works, this is to me for placebophiles.

[earsopen]

Strange that some of you persist in stating that a grounding box ' injects more noise' into a system. What an odd concept, and where did it come from?

Early on in this thread somebody posted a link to a site where a 'scientific' experiment took place, with lovely analyzer pictures to prove whatever, but the 'expert' did not measure the right thing. All he did when faced with a grounding box with one terminal, was connect a wire and measure that. Well, guess what? It acted as an aerial, just like the wire I used on an old radio so I could hear the music. Oh, and the short piece of wire (small aerial) picked up less signal than the long piece of wire (larger aerial). That's what wire does, it picks up signals.

If he had just put an amplifier on the bench, then added some speaker cables what would have happened? The cables would act as an aerial and pick up a signal because that is what wire does, but you wouldn't reject the use of speaker cables just because of that or your system would be very, very quiet.

In other words, those tests proved nothing about the grounding box itself, or the effect that it had.

You would need to be measuring inside the equipment that the grounding box was connected to, and that would be very difficult.

Better still, beg borrow or audition a grounding box in your own system. Difficult I know because for a while you would need to open your mind, suspend scepticism and submit to the tweaky foo side for a while, but if you could manage to, you would understand why these boxes have become a very common feature of many systems.

[Macca]

Strange that some of you persist in stating that a grounding box ' injects more noise' into a system. What an odd concept, and where did it come from?

Early on in this thread somebody posted a link to a site where a 'scientific' experiment took place, with lovely analyzer pictures to prove whatever, but the 'expert' did not measure the right thing. All he did when faced with a grounding box with one terminal, was connect a wire and measure that. Well, guess what? It acted as an aerial, just like the wire I used on an old radio so I could hear the music. Oh, and the short piece of wire (small aerial) picked up less signal than the long piece of wire (larger aerial). That's what wire does, it picks up signals.

If he had just put an amplifier on the bench, then added some speaker cables what would have happened? The cables would act as an aerial and pick up a signal because that is what wire does, but you wouldn't reject the use of speaker cables just because of that or your system would be very, very quiet.

In other words, those tests proved nothing about the grounding box itself, or the effect that it had.

You would need to be measuring inside the equipment that the grounding box was connected to, and that would be very difficult.

.

I think you missed this:

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/f...surements.476/

'My Audio Precision Analyzer which you see to the right of my desk below the Stax headphone amps has both an analog generator and analyzer. So I set up a simple test connecting the output of the generator to the analyzer. I then ran a THD+N test. This is a test where a 1 Khz signal is played by the generator. The analyzer has a filter at 1 Khz which sucks that tone out. Everything that is left is noise and distortion.

I ran the test two ways, without and with Entreq'

[YNWaN]

The idea that these ‘grounding’ boxes inject noise into the system comes from the measurements linked to near the start of the thread.

Bob, I’m afraid the points you raise are nonsensical in an electrical sense.

[Firebottle]

I don't necessarily think so.
The test made was a construct, in that a 1Khz tone was used being 'just' coupled to an analyser.

I din't think that is sufficiently close to a system playing audio to draw valid conclusions.

[Wakefield Turntables]

You would need to be measuring inside the equipment that the grounding box was connected to, and that would be very difficult.

Suppose the designer of the grounding box knows this. It would be very difficult to properly define just what these boxes do and how they do it, and ultimately therefore deny or confirm if they actually produce an improvement in hi-fidelity musical reproduction. I don't like the idea of that.