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In Reply to: RE: That's the weirdest thing...... posted by unclestu on January 05, 2013 at 13:15:32
a
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and the effect has not been universal. Worked on a friends headphone set, but not on his speaker (although we were experimenting with the battery ground tweak, so I am extrapolating the results).Another acquaintance claims good results on the positive terminal only. That has not been my personal experience, however. It's hard to verify as that guy lives about 3500 miles from me......
Why not try it, it can't hurt the components, as long as you use the wire loops and you don't short anything.Stu
PS Incidentally, Bud's recommendation that you use Litz wire, is interesting. Litz wire, with its stranded, insulated construction, would naturally have a higher capacitance.
I have also tried the tweak but using a large choke with both terminals connected to the negative terminal. That also works quite well. although the choke we used was huge: something like 15 henries and weighing over 20 pounds.
I believe the effect has also a lot to do with electromotive force: copper, silver, platinum and gold are the strongest elements, electromotively in that order. I have noticed just adding a very thin strand of silver to a copper loop improves sound to a degree unexplainable considering how small the silver strand was ( I was using 125 micron pure silver wire, which I normally use for rewiring tonearms).
Hanging my friend's wife's golden wedding ring on the negative speaker terminal also produced a rather startling leap in sonic performance. She , of course, didn't take to the idea of leaving her ring on the terminal....
Edits: 01/05/13
Thank you all for posting about the loops. I went ahead and gave it a try, twisting two 2mm diameter magnet wires, 8 inches long each, then connected in loop to the negative speaker post. I'm amazed by the improvement!
So if Litz wire is claimed to be better, maybe taking the guts out of several pieces of CAT5 cable, then soldering the ends together should be better than my large gauge twisted pair, right?
Stu: is the effect cummulative if I have the loops on the speaker terminals and then add a loop on the amplifier's speaker terminals?
A very nice tweak indeed!
I haven't tried it, but I imagine simply soldering the ends of a cat 5 cables all together will be an improvement over a simple twisted pair.
I solder my loops to the negative of an RCA end and simply plug it in to unised jacks on a preamp or DVD player: works wonders. And it is extremely easy to AB
Stu
"I solder my loops to the negative of an RCA end and simply plug it in to unised jacks on a preamp or DVD player: works wonders".
Good idea! Will try it out. Do you use it on the preamp unused RCA outputs or inputs?
Regarding the battery ground loop:
I see you use 10,000 uF caps across the battery + and -. Any other characteristics of the caps being used?
I have seen posts about regular 9V batteries and 6V 4Ah batteries. The latter are much larger, therefore more challenging to hide. Have you noticed the 6V 4Ah batteries to perform better for this application?
In your experience, battery ground loops have had more impact placed on your speaker terminals, amp's speaker terminals, or preamp's unused RCAs? Source is not an option for me as it's only a Metrum Octave with no unused RCAs.
Thanks a lot for sharing all this!!
for being so late in answering.
In my experience, which includes running a few lead acid battery types, I did not notice asignificant difference sonically. I did notice with greter cpoacitance tht the effect is increased, and am running as much as 100KuF on my DVD player. when running tha much capacitance, it becomes very much like a power supply and you need to add a bypass cap to suit your taste. while I use electrolytic caps for the basic uF's I bypass with a 1.5 uF film cap.
You can plug in the battery ground tweak into any RCA jack which is not used, or a phono ground, or a negative speaker terminal with out suffering any harm. Source components seem to benefit the most.
Stu
I had an experience that no one else has reported. After about four hours the high end fell off. It returned and was great after about eight hours. It is hard to explain breakin on a wire that does nothing.
I am not quite sure what you mean by a twisted pair. However, I recall when I used my Teflon clad CAT5 there was some instability in the sonic imagery for a period of time. Teflon is well renown in the DIY audio community of requiring a break in period. My experience with Teflon clad ground loops substantiates that notoriety.
DaveT
a
I have some around here somewhere. If I can find it, I'll try it.
Norm,
Unclestu referred to Budp's earlier posts, and the "surpluss electron supply" notion. I have no idea why this works, but if I follow that concept, more copper means more electrons...so I thought of adding more runs. I had rather thick magnet wire lying around so that was the quick and dirty way to try the tweak out. That's the only reason for the twisted pair.
Budp did mention Litz and dielectric, and I have CAT5 cable (super cheap), so building a Litz-type cable sounds yet like another iteration.
Regarding your comment about sonics improving, then degrading, then back to improved again, one of the many posts I read did mention something like this and the guy was speculating weather-related. He had a very dry few days in Texas, then rain, and he was speculating too-dry an air might be affecting it...just as a cable doing nothing improves sound, might weather affect this tweaks? I'm starting to loose it!!
Weather is undoubtedly responible for ups and downs in audio performance as is time of day and day of the week. I'm pretty sure most audiophiles have experienced better audio performance late at night or early in the morning. Sunday morning might be the very best time for critical listening. Unfortunately, there are other reasons why audio systems might exhibit up and down performance, some of which are pretty obvious, like break-in of components, cables, break-in of contact enhancers. Also changes one makes to the system, even subtle changes, over a period of time; some changes we make we forget, and some are not obvious, innocent things like bringing new books and magazines into the house. All these variables make it difficult to get a bead on what is going when evaluating anything.
Edits: 01/06/13 01/06/13
the audio system do the new books and magazines (that are brought into the house) have to be, to have an effect on the sound?
Ideally there should be no books, newspapers or magazines anywhere in the house. I suppose you could at least keep them out of the listening room. Unfortunately, the situation is actually much worse, since ALL media is bad for the sound, including video DVDs, LPs and CDs, if you see what I mean....
I can dig all the levels you're coming from.
In my case, however, the weather remained cold and rainy throughout the day. I just checked on the sound today. It remains rainy and cold here. I think the ease of the music and the sense of the soundstage is somewhat improved over last night.
When I get back from CES, I'm going to experiment with other cables as loops.
I'm not sure I understand your question.
Litz construction usually means fine individually insulated wires in an insulated bundle. so if you asking what I think you are ( dangerous assumption), a single litz strand has more capacitance than a single solid core wire.
However even with a full litz construction, capacitance will not that grea, not as freat as adding a capacitor
Hope you're having fun with all of this....
stu.
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