Chord GroundARAY

A neat, petite and extremely precise system grounding solution…

By Roy Gregory

Fashions come and fashions go, but as an audiophile you’d need to have been living in a cave (one without light, electricity or a postal service) to miss the current fascination with ‘enhanced grounding’ solutions. This interest is not entirely surprising, given the recent dramatic increase in digital technology – in the home and in our systems – and the subsequent increase in high-frequency noise pollution that goes with it. These days, it seems to be impossible to buy a refrigerator that doesn’t want to communicate your needs, desires and shortages to not just your smart phone but the world in general! Now consider the fact that enhanced grounding not only delivers readily demonstrable musical benefits, but devices to achieve that end can be added to almost any system (without the inconvenience of exchanging or disposing of existing units) and you’ve got what amounts to a perfect storm – at least in audio marketing terms.

So it is equally unsurprising that these days, there’s nary a cable or accessory company that doesn’t offer some form of grounding solution. The first comprehensive solution that I tried (back in the UK) was from Entreq, but at Gy8 that has been superseded by the neater and more effective CAD Ground Controls and Nordost’s QKores, components that have not just found favour but become indispensible parts of our system infrastructure. But the CAD and Nordost products have more than just that in common. Both involve owners in at least one extra box and multiple extra wires – and neither can be described as inexpensive, with even the most affordable option (CAD’s GC1) tipping the scales at £1,695 plus £300 for each additional ground wire beyond the one supplied with the unit (I’m sticking with UK pricing here as both Chord and CAD hail from the insular province). All of which makes the arrival of The Chord Company’s GroundARAY enhanced grounding solution as timely as it is welcome. Not only does an individual GroundARAY cost £550, its innovative thinking results in a svelte form factor that renders it essentially invisible, eliminating the need for any extra boxes or wires – although actually, that’s really where this story starts.

If you want to eliminate noise, where better to do it than at source – or at least where you find it? By co-locating your dissipation with the noise itself, you eliminate not only the need for a separate, remotely located box, but also the issues with transporting low-level signals from one place to another, not least the discontinuities and undesirable increase in impedance inevitable in a cable and its connectors. So, with the GroundARAY you are increasing practicality while reducing cost and complexity – what’s not to like? Well there’re a few things actually, although none that invalidate the Chord approach. Instead, they (literally) shape it and the way you apply it.

Dissipation is the name of the game…

When it comes to dissipating any kind of energy (normally by converting it to heat) the efficiency of the exercise is defined by how effectively the chosen medium converts the incoming energy – and how much of that medium you’ve got. One of the things that has made products like these possible is the emergence of a whole family of new, super efficient RF absorbers, meaning you can get more effective solutions from smaller boxes. The GroundARAY takes that to pretty much the logical extreme, partly as a function of necessity. If you want to place your dissipation as close to the system’s internal noise as possible, you need to connect directly to the ground plane via one of the unused input or output sockets. If you are going to do that, you need to create a seriously compact device, or it will interfere with or obstruct other connections on the unit. Each GroundARAY is built into an elegantly sculpted aluminium housing a mere 20mm in diameter and 95mm long, one that looks for all the world like an overgrown designer lipstick. The business end is graced with a plug (RCA, male or female XLR, USB A, BNC, HDMI, various Dins or RJ45/Ethernet) and you simply insert it into the chosen component. Whilst the simplicity, elegance and invisibility are all welcome, they are also the result of force majeur. Any bigger and the GroundARAY simply wouldn’t be practical. That it works at all – and believe me, it definitely does – is down to sheer proximity and the increased efficiency of the dissipation medium. As to what that material is, Chord is understandably coy, which makes it time to talk real world performance rather than theory – and the first question that needs answering…