Home Speaker Asylum

General speaker questions for audio and home theater.

Your approach may be masking a ground loop problem.

In general it is not a good idea to connect audio 'ground' to AC safety-earth at any more than a single point. It is also not a good idea to connect the audio grounds of separate amps together. With heterogeneous amps, you could experience a spectacular failure and destruction of the equipment.

Assuming your setup uses identical amps, they already share a common audio ground at their inputs (at least, one for each channel). They may or may not include internal connections of their audio grounds to their AC grounds, if they have grounded AC inputs. They also may or may not have their output return terminals connected to audio or AC ground.

Multiple connection points between AC ground and audio ground create physical conduction loops, that can inject noise from external induction into the audio signal path. By connecting your speaker returns together and to AC ground, you may be shunting ground loops with lower-resistance wire. While this may improve performance, it would mask a larger problem.


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