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Linn LP12s – Fire away!

Reaching a copper pipe next to the boiler or hot tank should not be beyond me. Thanks.

While on my bike ride today I thought of another thing you can try, but you may not like it, you'll need to be careful, I've done things like this before in an attempt to get to the root of an issue like yours:

You can try isolating all your grounds from the AC mains panel, take the ground wire that's now attached to your water pipe and cleanly wrap the other end around your plug strip ground pin, now plug this into a cheater then plug the cheater into the wall outlet first being sure that no ground wires are touching any of the lead pins of course, this is only temporary, just one tight clean wrap then pointing down is fine. Now you're isolated from the mains panel ground and your whole system is only grounded to the water pipe, reattach the TT ground lug as normal. Everything you need only plugged into this 1 strip, only attaching what you need for vinyl playback to this strip & only those needed interconnects plugged into your preamp. Listen with the ground wire attached the water pipe and then again with the ground wire removed from the water pipe, -all grounds lifted.

Also have we determined that your outlet strip has no other onboard accessories such as a power switch, LED, fuse or surge protector?
 
Reaching a copper pipe next to the boiler or hot tank should not be beyond me.

Maybe we need a separate thread on the best cable for a supplemental ground. Gauge? Stranded or solid core? Does direction matter? If it is clamped to the pipe, what is the best material for the clamp? Is gold plating better than nickel? What is the proper torque for the clamp? :)

I am almost afraid to search for any of this for fear that there is such a thread out there somewhere!
 
While on my bike ride today I thought of another thing you can try, but you may not like it, you'll need to be careful, I've done things like this before in an attempt to get to the root of an issue like yours:

You can try isolating all your grounds from the AC mains panel, take the ground wire that's now attached to your water pipe and cleanly wrap the other end around your plug strip ground pin, now plug this into a cheater then plug the cheater into the wall outlet first being sure that no ground wires are touching any of the lead pins of course, this is only temporary, just one tight clean wrap then pointing down is fine. Now you're isolated from the mains panel ground and your whole system is only grounded to the water pipe, reattach the TT ground lug as normal. Everything you need only plugged into this 1 strip, only attaching what you need for vinyl playback to this strip & only those needed interconnects plugged into your preamp. Listen with the ground wire attached the water pipe and then again with the ground wire removed from the water pipe, -all grounds lifted.

Also have we determined that your outlet strip has no other onboard accessories such as a power switch, LED, fuse or surge protector?

The dedicated radial feeds 8 sockets with fat wire from CU/ Henley/ meter box, as mentioned. The electrician avoided fuses, switches and lights on the sockets.
 
Maybe we need a separate thread on the best cable for a supplemental ground. Gauge? Stranded or solid core? Does direction matter? If it is clamped to the pipe, what is the best material for the clamp? Is gold plating better than nickel? What is the proper torque for the clamp? :)

I am almost afraid to search for any of this for fear that there is such a thread out there somewhere!

I'm sure Nordost & Audioquest will be on to this in a flash - watch this space ;)
 
I'm sure Nordost & Audioquest will be on to this in a flash - watch this space ;)

To be fair-ish, gullibility is not limited to just one audiophile niche. As yet, I have not yet been admonished by flat-earth-ists claiming that: -
A. The correct sound to enjoy is that from a pre-Cirkus LP12 with Ittok and Troika and no baseboard feeding 52, 52PS, 135s and Linn Kans.
B.Anyone wanting more bass than that, or more grip to it is not a proper audiophile.
C. Anyone wanting a vinyl front end to be silent when the needle is up is akin to those who dislike small scratches on their LPs - not trying hard enough to listen 'the right way'.
D. If Linn don't make a koffee table to go in your listening room, then you should not have one as an after-market part will ruin the sound.

It wasn't like that when I was a lad, kids today don't know how lucky they are etc. etc. etc.
 
Maybe we need a separate thread on the best cable for a supplemental ground. Gauge? Stranded or solid core? Does direction matter? If it is clamped to the pipe, what is the best material for the clamp? Is gold plating better than nickel? What is the proper torque for the clamp? :)

I am almost afraid to search for any of this for fear that there is such a thread out there somewhere!

My advise to help find the root of the buzz is temporary and for exploratory purposes only.. I assumed this was understood and the advise even perhaps helpful. A buzz can happen in any system and is not necessarily gear related or to assume the gear is inferior in some way.

To be fair-ish, gullibility is not limited to just one audiophile niche. As yet, I have not yet been admonished by flat-earth-ists claiming that: -
A. The correct sound to enjoy is that from a pre-Cirkus LP12 with Ittok and Troika and no baseboard feeding 52, 52PS, 135s and Linn Kans.
B.Anyone wanting more bass than that, or more grip to it is not a proper audiophile.
C. Anyone wanting a vinyl front end to be silent when the needle is up is akin to those who dislike small scratches on their LPs - not trying hard enough to listen 'the right way'.
D. If Linn don't make a koffee table to go in your listening room, then you should not have one as an after-market part will ruin the sound.

It wasn't like that when I was a lad, kids today don't know how lucky they are etc. etc. etc.

Whew, for a second there this sounded a little like me, but I had, Lingo, EKOS & DMS, a very tuneful LP-12 indeed. ...And in this day and age is it really too much to ask for the "vinyl front end to be silent when when the needle is up"? -and the buzz is still there when the needle is down too in most cases FWIW- I persoanlly haven't had a buzz in over 20 years, but if I do you can be damn sure I'll track it down. -Good luck Nick!, I hope you find the sounds you're looking for..
 
A. The correct sound to enjoy is that from a pre-Cirkus LP12 with Ittok and Troika and no baseboard feeding 52, 52PS, 135s and Linn Kans.
B.Anyone wanting more bass than that, or more grip to it is not a proper audiophile.
C. Anyone wanting a vinyl front end to be silent when the needle is up is akin to those who dislike small scratches on their LPs - not trying hard enough to listen 'the right way'.
D. If Linn don't make a koffee table to go in your listening room, then you should not have one as an after-market part will
Good advice for the current economic climate. :)
 
Infidelity visited for an extended session of hum-chasing.

Some mysteries solved! Sadly, not all.

We swapped back to my LP12, Superline and the same system I had before, and went to town on cable dressing. The Superline is still very sensitive to small changes in position or orientation, but I need the volume at noon or my head in a speaker to hear a hum.

As as apparently separate issue, no hifi box can now go into the old ring main - not sure what has changed versus 3 weeks ago, but something has. Lots of attempts at additional earthing wires had no effect on this or anything else. The Superline if carefully positioned is now quieter (and better in SQ) than the Trilogy phono stage, so my old LP12 plus Superline now does not have a problem.Switching on the Radikal, plugged into the radial socket, did not add any hum. Not sure why, but this was gong brilliantly...

The bad news is that the main hum on the Stiletto (still with Lyra Phonopipe arm cable) is as bad now as it was a week ago - i.e. loud with the volume at 9 o'clock. An hour earlier at the shop and plugged into my Superline and their 252/300, it had no hum at all.

As well as many positioning and earthing attempts, Infidelity also tried a Chord Powerhaus block, which has additional earthing arrangements as I understand it. It had no effect versus Hydra into the radial socket on the wall, except that actual music quality may have been a touch worse from our brief check. Nothing we thought of seemed to help the Stiletto.

Tomorrow, we will try swapping in the Linn T-Kable with the rest (including the Superline) unchanged. If that (plus suitable RCAs, which are imminent) does not fix the problem, then I don't know what to try, but I don't want to give up on the Stiletto just yet.

More news when I have it.
 
Maybe this is nothing to do with the answer but your old Sondek is made of a wood plinth so there is a certain isolation of earthing of each metal part or at very least a different earthing arrangement over the Stilleto which clearly "bonds" all the earths together due to its complete metal construction.
 
I think that the hum is fractionally quieter when I touch the metal box of the Stiletto, which certainly supports this idea.

However, just touching a wire to it and to the earth on the Radikal, Superline or 52 had no obvious effect at all. the fact that it is so silent at the shop is also confusing, as there is plenty of stray EM there.

More after we try a different arm cable.
 
A stupid question, but does the hum have any dependency on whether other sources are plugged into the pre?

(One of the things I like about old Nain is that 12 O'Clock is about right. Has that changed? Even works with my NAC12 connected to active ATCs)
 
A stupid question, but does the hum have any dependency on whether other sources are plugged into the pre?

(One of the things I like about old Nain is that 12 O'Clock is about right. Has that changed? Even works with my NAC12 connected to active ATCs)

Sadly no - that would have made diagnosis easier.
 
Surely the Earth bond to your watermain is supplementary bonding to stop you getting a shock from any of your sanitary appliances, i.e. stainless steel sinks, taps radiators etc etc. over 90% of water supplies are now run in PE pipe, which is plastic, this generally coverts to copper above ground, therefore your grounding isn’t going anywhere. Surely you would require a dedicated brass Earth rod driven into the ground for continuous Earth grounding.
 
Salvation!

Yesterday, we got my old LP12 working properly.


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Note Linn jig in background.

Not using my old ring-mains for anything hi-fi anymore, plus careful Superline positioning and cable-dressing equals no hum (unless the volume knob is past noon). If anything, it is now quieter than it was before we started all the faff.

I have also had a demonstration that cable-dressing may have less obvious and immediate impact with Witch Hat cables than with Naim cables, but I can’t ignore it if I want proper sound: I was just lucky with how it sounded last month.

We started today with Ekos attached to T-Kable but not in Stiletto – no hum.

We tried the same with the Lyra arm cable – still no hum.

We put the Ekos and T-Kable into the Stiletto – the hum was back, as loud as ever. However, touching the metal plinth clearly reduced it a bit, which told us where to go next.


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There is an earth cable from the Keel. We removed it. The loud hum was still there.

We already knew that removing the earth connection from arm cable to Superline had no effect by itself, but now we tried removing both the earth lead from Keel inside the Stiletto AND removing the earth lead from arm cable to Superline.

The hum dropped dramatically!

Emboldened, we went back to the piece of wire used for earth-testing. With both of the above earth connections removed, we (again) ran a wire from Keel directly to the earth connection on the LP input on my 52 preamp. Despite it having its phono boards removed long ago, having that wire in place while not also having the other earth leads connected solved the hum problem completely!

Next, with no hum, we tried the BNC adaptors – they give a small hum all by themselves as well as deadening sound.

The T-Kable is also longer than the Lyra cable by a useful amount. The T-Kable is staying and Infidelity can sell the Phonopipe to someone else, which will pay for the new T-Kable.

We still don’t know why this was such a problem in my house, yet the standard earth connections caused no hum for the previous owner or at the shop. However, I don’t care. So far, every LP I have tried (and there will be quite a few more played this evening) sounds as good as I have ever heard it in my house – or better than I have ever heard it sound in my house. I don’t even care that the extra earth wire looks silly.


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I should extend huge thanks to Infidelity, who devoted huge amounts of time to getting this fixed and succeeded. Also to Grahams for their suggestions, and to all those here who made suggestions.

This Stiletto (with Keel, Radikal, Ekos, Kleos, T-Kable and Collaro mat) is now very possibly my perfect LP12 and a great turntable by any measure – just like it was in the shop. Hurrah!




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