I thought this was a joke!

[Shane_B.]

I thought this was a joke but it's real! Here's a link to it on Amazon.

 

I had my DAW set up in my dining room. LSS ... 18 of her people will be here in 20 minutes for a Christmas gathering, so I'm down in the basement hiding now. LOL!

I set up my DAW down in the basement and the first thing I noticed is it's faster, and everything seems to work a bit smoother. Even the mouse lag on my TV/Monitor is noticeably less. I remember this has happened to me before and I asked about it a very long time ago when I lived up in Iowa, on the old forum. Moved DAW in the basement temporarily, and it worked and sounded better. I was at a loss.

I got to thinking maybe it has something to do with being surrounded upstairs in the walls with the AC wires and they are creating EMF's and maybe that's effecting my PC. I don't have any of that in the basement. So I just did a quick search for EMF protection for PC cases and this USB Grounding Cable came up. There ain't no way in h e double hockey sticks I am ever plugging that thing in to a USB port. First of all ... what if some idiot accidentally wired the outlet wrong and reversed the neutral and ground wires or you have a voltage leak between neutral and ground. You'd find out real quick when you plugged this bad boy in. Holy smokes!

[paulo]

36 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

18 of her people will be here in 20 minutes for a Christmas gathering

Ouch....

Never mind the lead......I'd be sticking my fingers into the wall outlet.

 

 

 

[InstrEd]

1 hour ago, Shane_B. said:

18 of her people will be here in 20 minutes for a Christmas

I would be hiding out too.  Social gatherings just don't make sense at this point in time.

[fret walker]

USB Grounding Cables have 0% dissatisfied customers 😀  Their next of kin might be unhappy though.

Edited December 18, 2021 by fret walker
clarification

[Shane_B.]

6 hours ago, InstrEd said:

I would be hiding out too.  Social gatherings just don't make sense at this point in time.

Neither do all the pokes and boosters every single person here including the children got. But here we are.

I just can't wait until I can get back to licking gas pump handles like the good il' days. 

[InstrEd]

19 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

gas pump handles like the good il' days.

When the gas had lead too 😛

[RobertWS]

If you believe that grounding plug does anything useful, perhaps you'd be interested in buying a DVD rewinder.

[craigb]

1 hour ago, RobertWS said:

If you believe that grounding plug does anything useful, perhaps you'd be interested in buying a DVD rewinder.

Remember to get two so you'll have the left-handed version too, just in case! 😁

[paulo]

6 hours ago, RobertWS said:

If you believe that grounding plug does anything useful, perhaps you'd be interested in buying a DVD rewinder.

Many moons ago after watching a DVD rental movie my sister genuinely asked the assembled viewers  if you still had to rewind them before taking them back. As you can imagine, no opportunity to remind her of this is ever missed.😀

[InstrEd]

3 hours ago, paulo said:

Many moons ago after watching a DVD rental movie my sister genuinely asked the assembled viewers  if you still had to rewind them before taking them back. As you can imagine, no opportunity to remind her of this is ever missed.😀

and of course you told her that she has to press and hold the rewind button until the DVD reaches the beginning

[bitflipper]

The first rule of grounding is that you minimize the number of paths to ground. Multiple paths create differences of potential between them, which defeats the purpose of having a common reference. Those differences may be very small, but we're talking about an environment in which very small voltages are our stock in trade.

Before I would resort to adding more ground connections, I'd take a hard look at my existing grounding and see where I might be creating problems. Your system may have shown improvement in the basement simply because you've moved to a different circuit, or went from having equipment plugged into multiple outlets to just one outlet.

 

[paulo]

5 hours ago, InstrEd said:

and of course you told her that she has to press and hold the rewind button until the DVD reaches the beginning

No. I'm not that mean.

 

I told her that it would be quicker to forward wind it to the end of the disc because both sides were the same...

[Zo]

The craziest thing is how did ya found it ? lol  @Shane_B.

[Bapu]

20 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

licking gas pump handles

I still do that....

What be the problem?

Edited December 19, 2021 by Bapu

[Shane_B.]

4 hours ago, Bapu said:

I still do that....

What be the problem?

It's just not the same since they introduced Ethanol out here in the Midwest. And don't even get me started about Bio-Willie-Diesel! Pa-tooey! The aftertaste is dreadful. I don't know what I'm going to do when we go 100% electric in 2050. If we make it that long after Windows 10 expires. 😩

[Shane_B.]

11 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Before I would resort to adding more ground connections, I'd take a hard look at my existing grounding and see where I might be creating problems.

Well, maybe this has a tiny bit to do with it. LOL!

I put up a train layout in my dining room for Christmas this year and this is 1 of 3 power strips. Hey, In my own defense, I converted all the C7 lamps to LED's. I have one of those AC line splitters for hooking an amp meter on for corded plugs. I threw my meter on the main plug and I'm drawing 351 Watts and it's 100% LED. That's without the train running. Plus I have a full sized tree with 300 incandescent lights. All on the same circuit. That said, I've seen no performance decrease with or without all of that, but I absolutely without doubt see a performance increase when I take my DAW downstairs.

At some point water dripped in to my main box in the basement. You can see corrosion on the lines coming in and nobody ever used conductive grease when they installed it. I wish I had a whole house shutoff to address that. My only option is to get the power company involved and I don't want to do that. I've seen video's on youtube of high end audio guys who had that same problem fixed and they added long grounding lines with many grounding rods way out away from their house just so they could get good grounds. It is extremely important to have a good clean ground. It was the first thing I checked on every copier and fax service call and I've solved many problems by dumping bad ground problems back on the customer to have them get an electrician to fix it. I've checked mine here and I'm getting almost nothing so even with the corrosion at the panel it's still pretty good. Back when I serviced office equipment the standard was less than .3 VAC between N and G with no load on the circuit. That's what I have here. 

That said, I recently added 4 USB charging port outlets to the bedroom remodel I did. I ran all new wire and checked before I added outlets and N to G was good. I put those USB charging outlets in and it jumped up to 3VAC. It's all lights and 1 TV on the circuit and it hasn't caused any problems with the TV so far, but that bothered me to see that much of a leak. It must mean that there is a constant load because of the built in charge ports.

[InstrEd]

Funny I was going to comment right away that your wiring looks like my old train layout wiring!  Then I read that it is your RR wiring 😆

[RobertWS]

14 hours ago, bitflipper said:

The first rule of grounding is that you minimize the number of paths to ground. Multiple paths create differences of potential between them, which defeats the purpose of having a common reference. Those differences may be very small, but we're talking about an environment in which very small voltages are our stock in trade.

 

Everything should be grounded but you don't want the dreaded ground loop!

Which, ironically, it looks like the item being sold would produce!

[Jeremy Murray-Wakefield]

22 hours ago, bitflipper said:

The first rule of grounding is that you minimize the number of paths to ground.

Indeed. I did a quick test a while back of connecting domestic ground to the USB ground to see if it did anything for USB chatter on the audio.

It did - it made it much worse! 🙄

[Shane_B.]

10 hours ago, RobertWS said:

Everything should be grounded but you don't want the dreaded ground loop!

Which, ironically, it looks like the item being sold would produce!

None of what I'm using on this circuit is grounded except for my DAW. My audio interface doesn't have a ground, none of the decoration lights do either, nor the monitor. I'm currently only using headphones so no powered monitors with grounded plugs and I don't have my rack mount hardware hooked up either.

Ground and Neutral are bonded at the panel. That's why it's bad to have a high voltage when you check the outlet. It means there is an EMF leak or other type of leak. I don't know what it is now but here in the US the acceptable reading between N and G used to be .3 VAC or less with nothing plugged in to the outlet/no load.

The problem with isolation transformers and AC filters with audio and video is, they chop the wave. The audio purist guys avoid those like the plague. This is the only way to really solve the problem. It's only $10,000 USD so maybe pick up two. Hah.

I had to switch to all balanced cables when connecting the audio path while using my monitors and rack gear. I was getting a bad buzzing sound, but the ground voltage tested ok. When I do hook all that up I have it all in a single power strip now. I have tried it both ways with everything plugged in separately. I had plans to build a small dedicated room in my basement to set up all my gear but never finished it. I wired a dedicated 20 amp circuit with 8 outlets to cover all the devices. It didn't make a difference. Got the same results with the properly grounded dedicated circuit as I did with just running everything off a single power strip with various things plugged in around the room.

That said, the only problem was audible noise when using all that hardware. What's happening here is a performance issue. I'm not one to buy in to all that EMF and Smart Meter and 5G 'EMF pollution' stuff, but who knows. That stuff reaches you far less below ground surrounded by concrete walls in a basement.