Entreq ground conditioners - what's the theory?

Sorry to pop any bubbles, but if you are using such devices to good effect, it simply means that the manufacturer(s) of your electronics have not done their grounding homework. It quite literally is that simple.

Ralph, the following manufacturers need to hire you as a grounding consultant:

AMR, Neodio Stahl-tek, Koda, BMC, Tube Research Labs, Gryphon, Accustic Arts, Tom Evans, Hovland, ASR, Emm Labs, Hovland, Karan, Exemplar, H-CAT, Boulder, Audionote, Gaku, Esoteric...just to name a few.

I guess we are faced with two paradigms here: suffocating, reductionistic thinking from a 1950s engineering textbook or a brave new frontier where all the answers or solutions for "noise" are not fully elucidated. I have repeatedly bumped into the former in regards to wire. Wire should not make a difference the engineers say...just pure audiophile witchcraft. The experiments we all know from the 80s clearly demonstrated that right? Well, newer measurement tools (http://www.stereophile.com/rmaf2010/nordost_and_vertex_measurements/) demonstrate changes in jitter with changes in cords, power conditioning, etc. Obviously there is more to the equation here.

It would be interesting to use that same software to measure effects of these magic grounding boxes, etc.

Ralph, Miguel at Tripoint loves a challenge. The next time you are at a show and have a room, an after hours demo is in order!

Agear, having had some experience with some of the manufacturers on your list, I have to agree. Others on that list did their homework.

FWIW, very few if any manufacturers from the 1950s got their grounding right. I work on Ampex stuff all the time; I hate to say it but their approach was really flawed. As you look at equipment that has been made over the decades, its pretty obvious that grounding was something some manufacturers understood and others didn't. That holds true in spades today.

That is why some people get benefit from exotic grounding schemes and others do not. So why harp on this? Simply because if manufacturers could get there ducks in a row, their equipment would perform better without a need for an exotic ground.

Power cords can have plenty of measurable effects and I have talked about the physics about why on other threads. Similarly, power conditioners can really help too (although most high end audio power conditioners are so much junk- the best one ever made was made by Elgar, model 3006, which embarrasses anything offered to audiophiles). It can put out a distortion-free 60Hz sine wave at full load of 28 Amps.

Ivan, the video changes are telling. Tripoint users have made similar observations. there's more to this than erroneous grounding schemes. Unless of course pioneer or Sony engineers are also clueless. Self-promotional hubris perchance?

You can sort out easily enough if the equipment is properly grounded by using a DVM. Connect one lead to the chassis and one to the center pin of the IEC connection or power cord. You should measure a short.

Then connect to the ground of the input and output connectors. You should not see a short- but some nominal resistance. I've seen a lot of power amps where input ground and chassis ground are the same thing. Such a unit will be sensitive to the earth ground. I've seen others where the chassis seems to float relative to the inputs. Again, there will be troubles with ground.

It does not matter who made it. What matters is whether its set up right.

Agear and Atmosphere: Here's how I see it: I'm absolutely convinced there is, and has been, such a thing as bad grounding schemes in perhaps all manner of hifi gear up to now...happens all the time. But, I don't believe for a moment that alone can account for the differences I've witnessed in my own home from this kind of noise reduction...this seems to go far, far beyond any "textbook" definition of proper grounding (whether equipment, home or whatever). The reason I think it does so is because this kind of noise reduction seems to be closely identifying and resolving the real-world problems that have never been addressed by the established ee books...and, considering the frequently less stringent requirements for grounding outside the realm of A/V, maybe that's understandable. But, with the available lessons learned from modern quantum physics (and again on which I am no expert), I'm coming to believe in the possibility of the next generation of pioneering ee's giving us new applications of new materials and techniques. Alan says he didn't do anything but go back to how mother nature establishes a ground and tried not so much to take his cue from the literature...and also, for example, lessons learned from trial and error IN THE FIELD by various commercial entities - what happened to them when they tried to implement accepted and established principles - sometimes with success and sometimes not...a frank look at the underlying conditions behind why those efforts sometimes work and why they sometimes don't. After all, THAT sort of thing to me is the REAL classroom - what happens when something accepted is applied and it doesn't entirely work. It's from that kind of endevor that we eventually wind up with the textbooks. I think so many people seem to get that cart before the horse - as if textbooks (theories alone) are somehow the "bleeding edge" of technology - to me, that's pretty close to myth. Of course the more we add to the texts, the more things we can hope to (endevor to) accomplish, but the REAL advances come when we are confronted with the unexpected challenge and we need to re-examine what we think we know. After all, this is precisely how those wonderful textbooks came to be in the first place. They didn't spring forth from a vacuum, but from necessary real-word problem solving. In my view, the classroom textbook is actually the back end of the process - it's the real world that's the front end. What is taught today is applied (and corrected) tomorrow - only to be taught differently the day after...and on it goes. It's just that now the folks who are far more familiar than I with quantum physics are getting their chance to take a crack at the problem. I believe there IS such a thing as innovation (and, without knowing, it can conceivably come from virtually any quarter), but without that inside track (quantum physics, in this case), the consumer then has no one else to rely on but himself when trying to put himself in a position to recognize innovation even when he's first looking at it. And that, I grant you, is therefore not always an easy or straightforward thing to do...but, come to think of it FWIW, that much about innovation has been true as far back as I can remember.

I also think Alan has figured out a rather extreme method for manipulating Ohm's Law in order to lower resistance house-wide in a way that evidently has not been done before and that this has led to his remarkable 'monopoly' on his brand of applications (which he's currently very busy recombining every time he has a breakthrough in a given area) and this so far has allowed him to keep going and moving the ball forward - not only to the point of coming up with ever-higher-performing products that are comparatively expensive (some over $1k each), but those that overwhelmingly outperform his previous examples, yet at a small fraction of the cost, as well. So, right now the sky's the limit and nobody seems to be on to his game yet. I expect that will remain true for quite a while, but we'll have to see how long that lasts...