Best wishes! It is great to hear that you are okay! 
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Best wishes for an uneventful and speedy recovery Galen. I’m sure that your best work is yet to come.
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Prayers for a speedy resolution to all issues!
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hoping for the best for you Galen
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Glad your wiring errors were caught early. I hope they get you patched up and back to working order again. Prayers and best wishes. I’ll have my review of your interconnects in a couple weeks.
Thanks,
Mike
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Hi Galen,
I was thinking about a statement you made about how an RCA is limited by its DCR. This led me to measure the resistance between the output of my integrated DAC/Preamp and a common point in my system I call my system ground. The system Gnd I have physically located near my AC Power Strip and have tied it to the Gnd of the AC Power Strip. I measured .13 ohms between the DAC/Preamp output GND and the system GND using my milliohmeter.
I bought some clamps https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B076Q7L1VZ
and put 1 clamp around each RCA jack of my new Iconoclast Series II interconnects. I ran
a 4 ft piece of 10 gauge wire from the clamps to the system gnd.
The RCA clamps were able to touch each other and I used alligator clip leads on both ends of the 4 ft wire to hook them up to the RCA jacks and then to the system Gnd. Measuring resistance between the same points as before, I now get .016 ohms.
This measurement is 8x lower than it was before. I repeated the measurements several times over two days to make sure of consistent results.
The result: Big increase in detail and soundstage. Cymbals especially much clearer and cleaner and easy to follow. Soundstage is now consistently bigger than the room. Reverb decays can be over 6 seconds.
I really didn’t think this would do anything, and am pretty surprised by the improvement. I don’t think it is subtracting from the design of the Iconoclast interconnects but it really seems to compliment them. I guess having a stable System Gnd point is really important?!?
Any tips since you know a lot about grounding and shielding?
Thanks, Mike
The “loop” DCR of an RCA is yes, important. The heavy double braid is so low DCR that the center wire is essentially the DCR. If the braid was zero DCR, the center wire is the signal path DCR. We can tune that wire(s) for electrical.
We don’t to inductively couple extra “signal” onto the center wire from the “ground” in parallel with it. The small signal wire isn’t the problem, but the differential ground current in the ground wire. All systems will vary some for the best to worst ground path.
You don’t want any currrent in the ground wire if it is all the exact same “point” in the curcuit. It isn’t, we add wire all over the place. The lower the ground wire DCR’s the less ground current we add into the system.
I will reference a paper on shielding and grounding. Transfer Impedance is a measure of a shields resistance across frequency in milli-ohm/meter. You want a low number at the frequency you are shielding. Shields are not the same at all as frequency changes. At audio, we are really close to DCR, though, so we can approximate to that circuit.
Best,
Galen
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@rower30 Galen, what is your opinion of cable risers?
Magnetic fields decrease with distance squared. If you are near power cables moving stuff, the power cable or IC / speaker cable, up and away can help remove noise that inductively couples based on length of the transfer distance. Some feel improvements with no “audible” pre to post changes.
They can be a serious trip hazard around your equipment, ask how I know! Perfect to catch your toe.
Inductance is sensitive to surrounding metal surfaces far more than capacitance. As low as the ICONOCLAST are changes can be seen easier than far higher inductance cables. But still, the changes are 0.01 uH/foot or the where abouts on testing done setting test specimins on various surfaces; metal lab table, the floor or suspended in the air. COILING hurts the electrical far more than surface treatments, avoid that cable treatment or allow a good space between the coils.
My cables are short, and suspended mostly in the air by default, so the argument isn’t applicable to my set-up. The RCA / XLR are shielded so no need to worry about surfaces, just the magnetic fields distances that ignore metallic shields. For magnetic fields you need DISTANCE.
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So Galen, if you have an XLR IC pair that is coiled up on itself, this can have an impact?
So, it is a trade off: Safety or Sound Quality?
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Tony,
Should be clear, UNSHIELDED speaker cable should not be coiled.
For shielded the shield isolates ELECTRICAL fields when coiled. But if you have MAGNETIC fields like power cords, coiled cables near signal cable noise will add proportional to the length coupling in the magnetic field for shielded or unshielded. Magnetic goes right through copper or aluminum metal.
To shield magnetic fields you need low permeability metal to magnetic field lines. If a MAGNET sticks to it, it will shield magnetic field. If a magnet doesn’t stick to the shield, it isn’t shielding magnetic fields.
XLR will cancel common mode magnetic noise to the limit of the cable’s CUB, capacitance unbalance or length differential that determines the total true electrical balance. Most cable is ~2% or better balance. None are perfect. This includes all the I/O balance too, not just the cable’s. The entire system I/O adds to the error in balance.
Best,
Galen
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Man cave probably OK, the living room less so with unmanaged traffic. Kids. Or just forgetting what’s under foot (me) movinbg out of the system area.
Best,
Galen
Galen, my best hopes for a speedy recovery from your medical issues!
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At my age and abilities… “SAFETY” beyond all other considerations! 
A 5% improvement is not worth a $50k hospital bill! It’s all relative to trade off and diminishing returns. At least that what the dog tells me.
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Hi Galen,
Thanks for the paper. Very interesting. I redid the system gnd and went from a alligator clip lead to the power strip to a soldered connection. This greatly reduced the system gnd resistance.
I think I’m turning into a soundstage junky. Your speaker and interconnect cables are my enablers. It is habit forming. Are your power chords as elaborate as your speaker and interconnect cables? Are they just 3 wire/large gauge cables?
Thanks, Mike
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Hi Mike,
Go here; https://iconoclastcable.com/techpapers/index.htm
The BAV series are really good for the performance. Technically a power cord should pass 50-60 Hz and that’s it. Remove everything else. The tests show that the 600V heavy industrial cords work really well for mitigating RF over tested reference cords.
I have not suggested that we need to do better, and at a substantially higher price. We would have to recover all the crappy design outcomes along the way, experience just reduces that, it does not remove it. Look at the ICONOCLAST for that aspect of market pricing. All the costs are single market recovered.
The BAV have MOST (XLR and RCA IC cable) if not all (power cable) development cost already paid for. Result? Higher performance for the price. The BAV power cords were a great find in testing.
Best,
Galen
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Hi Galen,
With regards to proper grounding…
Signal Gnd and Power Gnd should be the same at some reference point right?
I don’t see how the various Signal Gnds across different boxes in a system can be expected
to be at the same exact voltage level (ie 0). At least I’d measure it with a milli-ohm meter to see if this can be the case. Mine weren’t. Especially at my DAC (it has an external AC power supply).
So it seems a System Gnd and some extra wires from a box to that System Gnd might be needed. For me, it helped a lot with Soundstage anyway.
Thanks,
Mike
Mike,
All the way back to the circuit box the ground paths need to be the same, but yes, they can’t be. We keep adding different wires in the way so no true single point ground at zero potential to everywhere else. The best you can do is keep resistance LOW as possible relative to the current flow in the wire. E=I*R so any voltage is proportional to the resistance in the wire and current.
The bare safety wire is attached to the metal BOX so if the chassis box is shorted to the hot white wire, it grounds through the bare wire and not YOU. The white wire can set a BOX HOT if it isn’t grounded. Well, until you grab it!
Some systems are “double insulated and grounded” because the box isn’t grounded inside and/or is above earth ground for some reason.
The bare wire is connected to the junction breaker BOX at the same point as the neutral wire, but it provides a dedicated low impedance path to grounding the chassis or anything you touch that could be energized. The schematic for chassis / safety ground looks like this;
Best,
Galen
Hi Galen,
“All the way back to the circuit box the ground paths need to be the same”
circuit box?
Using the safety GND in the power strip as an arbitrary point for a designated system GND seems like as good a point as any. As long as all the boxes in the system are held as close to some reference point as possible anyway.
I don’t think I’m missing something. Or am I?
Thanks,
Mike