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If You Only Watch One REL Video This Year, Watch This One
The New, Simpler Way to Connect Ground. It's Safer Too
The below text is a transcription of the video.
Hi, John Hunter here. Listen. On our traditional RELs that use a high level connection, which is supplied by this cable that we include with every one of our high level empowered subs. It’s pretty simple. We’re going to make it simpler. So in the past, what we’ve suggested, nice click. That’s now connected up and this end goes to your power amplifier, right? Everybody who’s been doing this for years, knows and goes, yeah, okay, big deal. So we have two hots. Hot colors are hot, red is hot, yellow is hot. Red traditionally is used for right channel. Ground red is right and yellow goes to left channel, not ground. Excuse me. Hot, hot, hot. So what do we do with the all-important ground and why is ground important? Ground is important because if we don’t complete the circuit, it can hum with certain kinds of amplifiers like class D amplifiers or balanced differential amplifiers.
We float this, but I’ve got a better way to do this for everybody. Follow along. This is really simple. I’m not going to pull this off, but we come sort of pre-stripped a little bit here. We can pull it off. But instead of trying to connect this to the black terminal on the output of your amplifier, so you know the red and black terminals, instead of going to that ever do this. Strip this back a little bit. Find a chassis, ground or bolt anywhere on the back panel. If you see a random screw, just pull this back a little bit, tap it to it. If your hum goes like that, you found ground. Always go to chassis ground. And it gets away from all of the complexities of connecting high level, every one of them. But I have a class TM, great. Go to chassis ground, who works great.
What about balance differential and balance differential amp, there are actually two hots and no ground? Go to chassis ground. It works brilliantly every time. So it just eliminates all the complexity of connecting up one of our high levels to your power amplifier. And if you just look for the screws on the back, the best example of all are the Marantz receivers. They use these beautiful copper, some kind of a copper alloy on their screw head. So when you look back there, you see copper, copper, copper, copper all the way around the perimeter of the rear panel. Every one of those is a grounding point. So just find which way everyone is closest to the channel that you’re connecting up to. Take it right to that, tap it. You’ll hear hum goes away instantly. Unscrew that. Wrap this around a bit, tighten it back down. Clip off the rest, you’re done. Whole thing takes 30 seconds. That’s the smartest way to actually obtain ground on a real high level circuit.