Damping and Grounding

I have a few random things scattered throughout my stuff that I haven’t mentioned so far.
I got given a while back some damping plates from HRS the DPII-05545. These are smallish metal and rubber plates designed to sink any resonance out of case work or speaker cabinets or whatever. I wouldn’t use them on my speakers as I think a certain amount of resonance is a beneficial, and they have been designed to work that way, however I did notice the case work for my Mr T power conditioner seemed a bit ringy, so I put one on top of that. It totally deadened any resonant ringing it had which I think is a good thing. The only other big piece of metal case work I have is the transformer case for the Cortese power amp. I hadn’t noticed any noise or ringing, but I put it one there as well. They’re nicely made with an anodised black finish.

The blurb from HRS: “The HRS Damping Plate incorporates a highly effective design to eliminate component chassis noise revealing a new level of musical performance. They are precision manufactured from billet-machined aircraft aluminium and proprietary HRS polymers. A very specific amount of mass, stiffness, and damping from these products eliminate chassis resonance problems and transform residual chassis energy to heat. This is a special system utilised by audiophiles and industry professionals as their reference chassis noise reduction system.

• Broadband noise reduction design maximizes performance
• Effective on Electronic chassis and speaker cabinets
• Selection of sizes and heights allows system optimization
• Proprietary polymers optimized from years of listening tests
• High grip design creates very stable system”

Maybe they do nothing for the sound, but I do think damping casework is probably a good idea when we’re dealing with tubes and their potential for microphony. And they cost me nothing so no harm done, at least financially.

The other bits I have are a couple of ground wires for my turntables. On the Garrard/EMT I have an Audioquest GroundGoody Thunderbird I got from somewhere. It uses silver conductors.
Audioquest make a lot of noise about the purity of the metal and the smoothness of the surface of the actual conductor: “SOLID 6% SILVER CONDUCTORS Solid conductors prevent electrical and magnetic strand-interaction. To approach the ultimate Noise-Dissipation performance of our best conductor metal—Solid 100% Perfect-Surface Silver—increasingly thick layers of silver plating are applied to our Long-Grain Copper (LGC) conductors. Placing the superior metal on the outside of the conductor produces the greatest benefit on overall performance—a superbly cost-effective way to maximize a cable design.”

For a ground cable I don’t think it matters at all, but it looks nice, is well made, works and was cheap.

On the Technics I use a DIY ground cable made from one strand of Nordost Valhalla power cable that I got from somewhere. I terminated it with spades and it works well between the turntable and the Sentec phono stage.