A Second Noise Floor?

We hear the term, “noise floor” being casually tossed around and it has taken me years and thousands of dollars to figure out what it is and how it impacts the music I listen to.  Then…the floor drops from under you and you’re forced to look at it again to relearn what you thought you had already understood.

My previous understanding was that there was erroneous electrical signal being propagated, absorbed, emitted, etc, that was veiling or hiding frequency within music. It is noise, but not an actual audible sound. I had understood and heard how that acted on speakers, components and amplifiers.  There was a variety of products and tweaks that could reduce the “noise floor.”  Over the years, as I added equipment, products, upgrades and tweaks, I started noticing what emerges when the noise floor drops. Micro details and/or instruments, larger and expanded sound stage, and more realism to the tone of the sound, like the timber of vocals or the metallic, vibrating decay of a piano note.

That’s when it happened. I discovered there was another “noise floor” being impacted that I didn't know existed.

I discovered that my power distributor, the Shunyata Venom V16, has an external chassis ground connector.  This is part of their CGS tech and it isn’t advertised on the product; yet there it is, ready to be used. It is marked for Earth Ground and not Chassis Ground, which I thought was odd; in engineering, those two symbols are not interchangeable. I built my own external Earth Ground Box and created a custom cable to connect the box to the power distributor.  I wasn’t expecting any real benefit, but it was DRASTIC! So drastic in fact, that it destroyed my understanding of  the “noise floor.” The instant I plugged it in, the sound changed.  Snare drums, cymbals, tambourines, xylophones, and various other percussion instruments didn’t just show up in the background.  They came in front and center in the most in-your-face way that it completely altered the majority of the music I listen to. Vocals were clearer, resolute, and separated pin-point from all the other instruments in a 3D space, and not in a subtle way.

I thought, there was NO WAY, bleeding off excess electrical signal into ground is going to suddenly make micro details louder and more evident without changing the volume level of the lead singer and other instruments.  It didn’t make ANY sense…until I realized an important detail.  My music isn’t pure analog; it’s digital. O_O That meant, there was another “noise floor.”  The digital “noise floor.” Packets of information not only relay what instrument/sound is played, but what position it is in and how loud it is. My computer is plugged into the same power distributor and is therefore benefiting from the Earth grounding box. It must be allowing a cleaner distribution of digital packets over USB to the DAC and the DAC is then able to generate and create a more accurate analog signal.

At least, that’s what makes sense to me.  I could be very wrong; but how else do you explain the drastic changes?