The Importance of Clean Power Supply and an Effective Grounding

by DrWho Wed Apr 05, 2017 5:43 pm

The Importance of Clean Power Supply and an Effective Grounding

Below is part of an interesting article on The Importance of Clean Power Supply and an Effective Grounding. For the full article which include the review of the grounding equipment,visit HERE

STAND YOUR GROUND

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by Roy Gregory | Apr 03, 2017

Categories: Audio

The Importance of Clean Power Supply and an Effective Grounding ?size=648,460

For years, one of the best-kept secrets in hi-fi has been that the single most cost-effective upgrade you can make to any system (regardless of price or ambition) is to provide it with a dedicated AC supply equipped with a parallel, clean ground. Even after paying an electrician to do the work and deliver the hardware, the financial impact is negligible compared to even a budget box full of electronics, while the musical and sonic benefits are both substantial and fundamental in nature. That might seem like a bold statement but consider the issues for a moment and the logic is unassailable. Not only does the AC supply constitute the raw material from which your system is trying to recreate the musical performance (and as we’ve all experienced, a substantial part of a great meal is having quality ingredients), but it also provides the drain down which all spurious electrical noise is supposed to disappear – which leads us directly to the crucial question of noise floor…
Arguably the biggest challenge facing any audio system is matching the dynamic range of real life: not just the power and scale of real instruments, but also the micro dynamic subtleties, harmonics, and the immediacy of the energy they produce. Collectively these qualities define the system’s ability to imbue the recording with a sense of musical presence, the impression of real instruments in the same space as the listener. You can add ever more power to your amplifiers and buy increasingly efficient speakers to give the system greater headroom, but that’s only half the battle (and financially and practically speaking, a losing battle at that). At the other end of the scale, banishing noise – making the system quieter – delivers equally if not more impressive gains and does so at a fraction of the price and domestic impact. The whole issue of dedicated supplies barely raises its head, with clean grounds an even rarer topic of conversation. Yet as I’ve already stated, both options deliver musically crucial benefits in terms of noise performance and musical integrity. Why aren’t they automatic steps in establishing any audio system? Partly one suspects, because most of the dealers doing the advising and installing the systems would rather sell another box or a more expensive box than hand off the business to a third-party electrician. There again, it’s not always possible to achieve a clean ground: It’s all very well saying bury a ground post in the garden, but that doesn’t help someone living in a third floor apartment (and let’s also point out that your clean ground runs parallel to and isn’t a substitute for the main AC ground – it’s called a safety ground for a reason!).
But there are two things that we can say with absolute certainty: Given the ever-increasing amount of airborne and mains-borne pollution we suffer these days, any system will benefit from sensible attention paid to the quality of its AC supply and grounding arrangements: Secondly, irrespective of the steps you can (or can’t) take to ensure AC and ground integrity, there’s nothing to stop you extending the provision both within the system itself and beyond the electrical into the mechanical realm as well. The notion that electrical and mechanical grounding are directly equivalent might seem alien, but in reality they both act on the system’s performance in exactly the same way, banishing spurious noise and lowering the noise floor. Just as the AC supply and equipment support are both crucial aspects of system infrastructure, helping define the operating conditions (and thus the potential performance of all those expensive boxes of electronics) so mechanical and electrical grounding act in concert. In issue 143, Alan Sircom discussed Nordost’s Sort products, a range of components that offer mechanical grounding solutions across the complete system: it should come as no surprise that the various all-Sorts are designed to operate in tandem with and demonstrably deliver their best performance when used alongside the company’s QRT AC distribution products. But these are only one example of a new understanding and a new category of infrastructure solutions, second generation grounding products designed to operate within the system itself to eliminate spurious noise and distortion. Let’s look at three such products that promise to put a smile on the face of any system – and its owner.