@sheri2022 - the greatest gain to sound realism at any point of your audio journey is in establishing a good grounding solution for your system, one that may well exceed the gain of any component upgrade.
The reason why I asked if you lived in an apartment or a house is because there is little that will outperform a well grounded copper rod in a garden, but even if you don’t have access to garden earthing, there are affordable solutions which will bring you 70/75 percent of the way there.
There are many sites online that will explain what it’s about, but it basically boils down to running conductive wire from ground post, or available chassis screw or ground leg of RCA/XLR/USB port on each component chassis to a central point, where the large and small electrical vibrations killing sound quality and resolution in both analogue and digital systems are drained and put away.
The vital issue of note is that regardless of solution you finally select, your grounding route is of utmost importance. Grounding works best when the ground path follows the signal path as closely as possible. The traditional method was to star ground all components to the preamp, since this was the one component all the others typically sent their signal to. Now, with systems comprising a turntable, CD transport, and streamer at most, and more typically just a digital front end of streaming, that same star grounding no longer applies. While a Tri-star ground path will work for the three different sources above, a system dedicated to pure digital streaming runs a very different ground path.
Synergistic Research have showcased their grounding solutions for years now, ahead of many other big companies now jumping on the bandwagon, but their heavy-handed marketing push for star-grounding in the ultimate sense, where every single component or box had to have their own dedicated ground cable wired to their central ground box, passive on the low end, and fully active for their range topping models. This has had the unfortunate effect of many audiophiles spending household quantities of money on a rats nest of ground cabling…..in the worse kind of configuration for a digital system.
With digital streaming, there is only one signal path, which logically implies a daisy chained ground path.
Linear power supplies with ground posts are wired to the respective component they power, but the ground path basically follows the signal chain from modem to router, router to switch, switch to streamer or server, streamer to DAC, and DAC to pre. For inexplicable reasons, the rule of following the signal path does not include the amplifier, the inclusion of which results in poorer grounding.
So in the case of your apartment, the amp, preamp (with daisy chain before it) and power distributor are finally wired separately to the ground arm of a regular power plug, which then gets plugged into a regular power socket.
If you’ve been patient enough to read to this point, know that without need to make audiophile grade purchases of any sort, you can simply test the effectiveness of this particular grounding solution I’ve detailed with entirely off the shelf electrical supplies. It will cost the tiniest fraction of the cheapest component you can find, to a gain in realism that might well surpass anything you have bought to date.
Do excuse my lengthy post, I hope you or anyone else found it helpful : )
In friendship - kevin
