Quote:
Originally Posted by piolaxo
Thanks for the insight. Yes it is not crazy expensive, so I could be
interested. I have one tuner that is not hooked up and it may give up its
place in the rack. Real state is at a premium.
After watching a couple of videos I can see the benefit. The preamps and
the amp are the immediate targets, but the some of the sources as well.
Now, I need to do more research on the components to see what is likely
to be grounded and what not. Some have a ground screw, others nothing.
In one of the Shunyata videos I heard that there would be a database
to guide which components were candidates for chassis grounding and
which ones for signal grounding, but I didn't find it. That could be quite
useful.
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Actually, the guidance is straightforward:
1) If you will be getting a
single Altaira ground hub for your
entire system, get a
CG Altaira hub. Whiie it's optimal to use a dedicated ground terminal on the component to connect a Shunyata CGC (chassis ground cable) from the component to the Altaira, you can also use a chassis fastener (after checking with an ohm meter between that fastener and the ground pin in the IEC receptacle that a connection to ground is made, i.e., reading < 1 ohm). If neither those connections is possible, you can use an unused interface port (e.g. an unused RCA or XLR input or output) by using the appropriately terminated CGC ground cable. So, for example, if you have an unused RCA input or output jack, the RCA "barrel" makes a connection to chassis ground, so that RCA jack can be used. If your component is dual-mono, you should use TWO CGC ground cables, one for each channel, to the CG Altaira. Same applies for unsued XLR interfaces. The key thing is, if you are going to use an RCA or XLR port to connect a ground cable to Altaira, you MUST use a Shunyata RCA or XLR ground cable (or ground cable tail), because it is constructed so that the cable only makes a connection to "chassis ground" (DO NOT use a
regular IC in this application).
2) If you are going to be implementing a "segmented system", e.g. one Altaira for say, a "digital stack" (e.g., streamer, network bridge, switch, or DAC, etc) and another for the "amplification" stack (integrated, pre, stereo amp, monos, etc), the guidance is to use
SG hubs for this application. Same rules as in No. 1 above apply for connecting your components to these (respective) Altairas. In some cases, this can be more straightforward. For example, if you're connecting a DAC, and have an unused S/PDIF, BNC, or USB port, you only need to connect a single cable from that DAC to the Altaira. If you're connecting an Ethernet switch, you can connect a CGC with an RJ45 "tail" to an unused RJ45 port on that switch, and so and so forth. Whle it's optimal to have a proper, dedicated ground terminal as a lot of the Asian company components (Esoteric, Aurender, Lumin, etc) do, the range of various tails ensures you should be able to connect to an unused interface port, whether it be RCA, XLR, S/PDIF, BNC, RJ45, USB A/B, etc, to connect these devices to your Altaira.
Here's a real world example: Because my Constellation Inspiration integrated is my only "analog amplification device", I'm using a dedicated Altaira SG hub just for the Inspiration. As the Inspiration is fully dual-mono throughout, and there is no dedicated chassis ground terminal, I am using
two XLR ground cables, one for an unused
Left XLR input and one for an unused
Right XLR input. Same would apply for the RCA connections on unbalanced only components, e.g. from C-J or First Sound, etc. For example, for my First Sound preamp, which is also fully dual-mono, I would also connect two individual RCA ground cables, one for each channel.
Hope this helps...feel free to ask if you have any other questions.