Grounding the Cascade Powerbase to the power amplifier’s chassis made a very significant improvement in sound quality. The soundstage width expanded with better instruments/images separation and low-level details can be heard more clearly due to a lower noise floor. These differences can be easily identified with an A-B comparison.
Try grounding the powerbase of any MSB DAC, and you will be pleasantly surprised how much improvement can be achieved. Grounding my previous Reference DAC also achieved similar sound quality improvements.
Try it and be surprised
Got same results grounding Reference DAC PowerBase to S202 Amp.
Wonder if the benefits would apply if all equipment share the same ground wire at the outlet, in a star ground configuration. Any experience on this?
I was pleasantly surprised when I tried this with my Premier DAC many years ago.
In my case I use 3 wall sockets:
1 for the S202 amp
1 for a Puritan PSM-156 feeding just the PowerBase of the DAC
1 for a second Puritan feeding all the souces
Each Puritan has its own GroundMaster City connected to it and plugged into 2 other different wall sockets. It means 5 dedicated lines in total.
Every component is also connected (but the amp) to a single CAD Ground Control GC1 (4 in total) via their own ground cables.
Wow. Quite an electrical setup. I am simpler. Everything connected to gigawatt to protect against power surges, and that’s it. Only one ground to rule them all.
Having the amplification (and DAC) on the front wall, and sources on the side wall, I have 2 different locations to power.
Each location has more than 1 wall socket (dedicated line) available, that I wanted when I rebuilt my room in order to get more flexibility for future needs.