Chord Company GroundARAY

Chord Company GroundARAY

British cable brand Chord Company has announced a major new development of its proprietary ARAY noise-reduction technology with the introduction of its Chord GroundARAY family of grounding devices.

The Chord GroundARAY is a high-frequency noise-reduction device that connects to unused sockets on A/V equipment providing a low-impedance route for HF noise to pass through, improving, says Chord, the noise floor of the ‘host’ product.

CHORD GROUNDARAY GROUNDING DEVICES

The GroundARAY is a cylindrical design made from precision CNC-machined thick-walled aluminium; the thick walls are designed to themselves stop the device from contributing HF noise.

Available in six termination options, including USB A, RCA and XLR, for a wide range of digital and analogue A/V device.

CONSTRUCTION

Each GroundARAY is built by hand at Chord Company’s Wiltshire factory, including the system components themselves.

The GroundARAY comprises a number of absorption devices, attached with a double ultra-high-bandwidth connector system.

Each GroundARAY cylinder is filled with a carefully chosen material to deaden noise.

The final assembly is then locked into place to reduce any effects from acoustic vibration.

GroundARAYs are most effective when used across several devices in an A/V system.

The devices simply plug into existing empty sockets and can be used individually, or in multiples, such as across left and right outputs etc.

With DACs and streamers, GroundARAYs can be used with unused digital inputs; with the British brand claiming that projectors and screens can also benefit from the noise-reduction effects, too.

GROUNDARAY DEVELOPMENT BACKGROUND FROM CHORD COMPANY

Chord Co explain the backround to their new product:

“For years, Chord Company has been developing proprietary technologies to reduce both low- and especially high-frequency noise, many of which, such as shielding, can be found in its cable ranges today.

In 2012, Chord Company introduced a solution to reduce damaging HF noise present in the equipment itself: the company’s proprietary TunedARAY mechanical tuning system.

Successive and more advanced variations, such as SuperARAY followed, but the ARAY designs were always specific to the cable they were working with, limiting the technology due to space and other design factors.

In 2017, Chord Company started to prototype a next-generation ARAY system, one that would work over the widest range of high frequencies possible, with very high efficiency.

This ARAY was designed from the ground up, without any of the limitations imposed with cable design.

The next-generation ARAY system was designed to operate independently from cables, but work with them in helping to reduce HF noise on the signal ground.

This new group of devices became known as GroundARAYs and in order to work with different types of A/V equipment, needed to have a selection of different plug adaptors: RCA; DIN; BNC; RJ45; USB Type-A and XLR male and female”.

The product’s effects are really quite remarkable.

Chord GroundARAY is designed to be connected to an unused socket on a component, it then very efficiently absorbs noise on the signal ground, leading to very noticeable improvements in overall performance.

You can add as many of these to a system as you like, improving performance more and more with each one you add!

A great feature, you will want to keep adding more and more to your system.

Available with many different connection options – XLR (male or female) RCA, USB, HDMI, 5 pin DIN, BNC & RJ45

Like many things in HiFi/AV, it is best to start at the source.

In many cases these days that would actually be the data switch.

From demonstrations that Chord have done, adding the RJ45 model to their English Electric 8Switch or 16Switch makes a marked improvement.

You can then add more to your streamer, other source components, DAC, preamp and so on

You can also add multiple GroundARAYs to a single component and get a significant upgrade in performance as you add more.