Lifting the Ground

Generally, lifting or floating the ground does indeed improve sonics. Unless perhaps you had a dedicated ground like a copper pole going 6ft into the earth for just the audio circuits/lines.

For most of us without dedicated grounds, the common ground usually attaches to the nuetral bus somewhere within the service panel and I think this may explain why the ground actually induces sonic harm.

In my experience and under most conditions I float/lift the grounds on all components except for the cdp source component. It is this configuration that typcially provides the best sonics.

FWIW, I use dedicated line conditioners on all of my components so I have no idea what one might expect floating the grounds without any line conditioners.

At this moment, I have all grounds floated but two days ago I had only the cdp grounded.

-IMO

Jea48, as you probably know most all components have 3 pronged connectors for AC. But as you point out a few will only have two. My old APL 3910 had only two because APL snipped off the grounding blade at the IEC connector exiting out of the chassis.

All Esoteric units have the three prongs. However, Esoteric seems to insist on using only their power cable for the G25u Master Clock Generator. Because their power cable only conducts the hot and neutral leads and no ground.

Hope this helps,

Rockyboy, depending on the resolution of your system and the quality of line conditioners one should be able to hear a much lowered noise-floor, better soundstaging and imaging, and less negative sibilance. And perhaps improvements in other categories.

But keep in mind that for the past 5 years I've used what I consider the best line conditioners available. And this alone dramatically enhances such electrical changes. So when I lift the ground on a given component, I'm actually lifting it on the line conditioner or perhaps at the wall. I'm also using dedicated line conditioners (one for each component).

Without proper line conditioning one has far more serious sonic issues to address than just the potential sonic harm induced by a common ground.

Floating the ground should have little or nothing to do with the amp's power output because it has to do with cleaning up the dirty AC. As for safety, so long as one component is properly grounded, safety issues should be minimal.

Lastly, everybody has very dirty/noisy AC (a few worse than others) coming in from the street. It's the nature of the beast and it must be dealt with properly.

-IMO