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Originally Posted by Whart
Grounding issues are bedeviling. I think you have to separate out several different things that may be going on: first, a good ground- usually that means a separate grounding rod or series of rods or other grounding network outside- sounds like you already have that. It is also likely in common with your house ground for code reasons. If you have separate dedicated lines, they can have a different ground potential, even though they all go to the same ground. That's one of the reasons the Brits typically plug their system into one receptacle and run a distribution box from there to their whole system- it eliminates the differences in ground potential between different outlets. Not so common in the US, what with big, power hungry amps that need current. Your Nordost distribution box is, I think, star grounded, so the outlets act as if they are seeing the same ground. There are also devices that allow you to externally 'star' ground various components, not in lieu of the ground on the AC plug/receptacle, but in addition to it. The Granite Audio device, which I have experimented with does that, and allows you to change the impedance of the different ground hook-ups but it is only modestly effective. The Tripoint products, at a much higher level, do something similar I think. And that may also be what the Entreq grounding product does. Some of this also has to do with how the various components are grounded at their chassis. And, how that, in turn, gets combined when components are connected via various cables to each other. That can create additional grounding issues, which is one of the reasons why, I think, people often 'lift' ground at a component through cheaters. There's a lot written on this that you can read on the Net. (And i'm not advocating using cheaters here, just saying, how different components are grounded internally adds another level of complication to thinking through your grounding harness or AC wiring, because they wind up getting connected to each other and grounding problems then crop up, beyond just getting the AC outlets correctly grounded). Somebody like JDandy can probably chime in here with technical expertise- I'm just telling you what I have learned having to deal with the issues; using very high efficiency horns, I have good reasons to get the noise floor as low as possible, and it makes a huge difference in the quality of the sound.
Roy has a separate ground wire that is accessible in his home listening room. There is a write up about Roy's home listening room and AC/grounding scheme somewhere on the Net. You can reach out to him, he is pretty accessible, and a very nice, knowledgeable guy who, in my estimation, asks the right questions.
I'm going a different route on my next room, using the big Equi=Tech Wall Cabinet. It is not a grounding solution, per se, but with a big isolation transformer, and balanced power, some of the issues associated with AC noise will hopefully disappear.
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