Hi romaz, how does the Entreq grounding relate to the Audience power conditioner (of which I have a variant)?
Does the Entreq compliment the Audience or replace it?
In my system, I find them to be complementary as they fulfil different duties. If you have dirty or inconsistent quality AC power, particularly if you don't have a dedicated line, the improvement with the Audience unit is quite remarkable, especially with the latest version of the Audience that uses OHNO cast copper wiring and the better receptacles. I can't speak for other units but with the Audience, each receptacle (and not each pair of receptacles) is isolated and so you can plug in digital or analog equipment into adjacent receptacles with no worries about backwash and cross pollution. If you have units with switching power supplies, this is especially beneficial as they are notorious for spewing pollution into the mains line. The nice thing about the Audience units is that they are all upgradable to current spec. You can send your unit in and for a nominal fee, Audience will upgrade it or even modify it per your request. I asked them to insert a grounding lug so I can ground the chassis and they did this for me. They also installed my preferred Furutech GTX-D (Gold) receptacles in lieu of their standard Cardas Rhodium receptacles.
There are some components that don't benefit from conditioning and may actually be impaired by them. NAIM source components, for example, prefer no conditioning at all and so Audience makes a power distributor that was co-designed by NAIM that doesn't provide conditioning.
@paul79 feels power conditioning prevents that "artist in the room" sound from his TotalDac d1-twelve and so he doesn't use one and so you will want to experiment to see if the positives outweight the negatives.
With signal grounding, whether it be with an Entreq box, Tripoint, CAD, Synergistic Research or any other brand, this has the potential to have the greater impact, in my experience, as they ground the final signal that reaches your transducer. They can overcome not just the EMI/RFI that is present in your mains line but also along every other part of your chain from your server to your DAC to your amp as each of these components will generate EMI/RFI. If you ground each of your components, I suspect you could completely do away with AC power conditioning. Aside from cost, thus far, I have seen absolutely no negatives with signal grounding.
If I had to select one, I would choose signal grounding.
