[Bill Epstein]

Got the Cinemags back from Steve Brown on Wednesday. As you read in last months episode, I had tried so many grounding schemes they were now kinda screwed up. He restored them to the  wiring of the Cinemag website latest scheme and cleaned up some joints.

With Steve's admonition to use a ground wire from the Cinemag chassis ground to Cornet chassis ground I fired it up and had a lot less, but still audible hum. Moving the unit and wires around made it better and worse as the position changed, so I had an inspiration.

This AM I spent a cuppla hours slipping 95% coverage tinned copper braid over the unshielded White Lightning (my whole system is so wired) ICs in classic grounded source - open end from Cinemag to Cornet.

DEAD, FREAKIN' QUIET!!! 

[smbrown]

Congratulations, Bill! It didn't ocure to me that you were not using shielded cables!

[amandarae]

Great news!



regards,

Abe

[taskerc]

Hi Bill,

Great news!  Which end of the shield did you have "grounded" - at the Cinemags or at the Cornet?  OR did I misunderstand?

Chris

[Bill Epstein]

Shield grounded at source, the Cinemags. Usually, but not always, source grounded is most effective.

[taskerc]

Gotcha - thanks Bill.

Chris

[tubesforever]

Bill,

Your killing me dude!   Unshielded IC's are equivalent to an ideal antenna for RF and EMI intrusion.

Shielding IC's is a good thing and double shielded cable is a requirement in many mil spec applications.   

For others reading this post, if shielded IC's are new to you, you want to ground the shield to only one end of the RCA's and float the other connectors, otherwise you can get some interesting ground loops. 

Bill you are my diy hero!  I am glad your system is silent now. 

Perhaps this is an important message to send out to others.  I recommend using a properly shielded IC connector.  Shielded cabling is the safest way to fly.

Cheers!

Cheers!

[Bill Epstein]

You should see'm, Tubes. I only had 1/4" Techflex on hand so I isolated the braid with 1/2" black shrink tube! This pair is now Black Lightning

The Woods extension cord is a 3 wire with a 1" twist so does a good job of rejecting RFI.

One of the last projects I did before hanging up my reviewers hat was to compare 3 major brands of mid-priced cables, $4-600 for ICs and $800-1200 for speaker cables. I found that the best cables were more dynamic sounding than the worst and excelled at treble info more than bass. I won't comment further because they're all tone controls and are so system dependent to make any finding fairly worthless.

At any rate, I was tipped to the White Lightning soon after the cables departed, built'm, and decided they sounded 'better' than any of the name brands!

http://6moons.com/audioreviews/whitelightning/moonshine.html