THE POSEIDON EFFECT

Since its release in 2015, the Poseidon has had a dramatic effect to the Entreq range. I find that it is now the most popular entry point for customers wanting to ground their system. Of course the  Silver Tellus and Minimus are still popular for more simplistic and modest systems but in a fairly high level system that is open and transparent, the power of the Poseidon is more appropriate and you benefit from a very good performance/£ ratio.

The advantages of investing in a Posiedon package are largely twofold. Firstly, as well as grounding the signal planes of two components, the Poseidon will also ground the speaker outputs of your amplifier and this is generally as least as big a sonic upgrade as grounding an entire system with a Silver tellus. Secondly, the Posideon box contains the new Olympus mineral mix which itself is far more powerful than the Silver mix found in the Silver Tellus and Minimus. And the cost of the Posiedon over a Silver tellus ? Less than £1500 or significantly less than a Silver tellus which has been upgraded by an Atlantis Tellus.

To understand the impact of the Posiedon further we must first understand the effect of grounding the speaker outputs in more depth. This is a relatively new Entreq discovery and its effect was found to be most profound.

In essence each of the two negative speaker terminals on your power amplifier are grounded to a separate Entreq box. I must stipulate very clearly that this can ONLY BE PERFORMED with two distinct and completely separate grounding boxes which also do not share any grounding with any other items. You must never connect your speaker outputs to a common third party and in addition, you must not ground the negative speaker terminals and then other hifi components (e.g. peramp, dac etc.) to the same grounding box. If in any doubt, contact myself or Entreq for advice.

So to recap, grounding the amplifier speaker output involves connecting one grounding box to the negative left channel of your speaker output at the amplifier, using an Ertha spade to spade and then doing the same for the right channel using a completely separate grounding box. The diagram below says it all. The only thing to add is obviously you connect your speakers too in the normal way and if you are using spades on your cables then you simply have the entreq spade Ertha situated first against the amp binding post and then you sit your speaker cable terminal on top of it then screw it all up tight.

The Posiedon box is designed primarily for this type of grounding. Inside a Posiedon you have basically three Olympus Minimus boxes (for the price of just 2) which are completely discrete and unconnected. So you can use two of them to ground each of your speaker outputs and then you have a third left over to ground the signal ground of two of your components (e.g. preamp and phono).

Now you are probably thinking back to a Silver Tellus and reminding yourself that it can ground up to a whopping eight components. Well yes that is true, but firstly grounding just the speaker outputs is generally as big an upgrade as grounding the signal plane of an entire system. With the Poseidon you also then grounding two items with its far more powerful mineral mix.

For your earthing cables the Apollo are the most popular and around 70% of all customers opt for these. They are nearly always better than every cable below them and offer a sweet spot in performance. A Poseidon package then with x2 apollo spades and x2 apollo signal cables (either RCA or XLR) works out at £4860. The more transparent the system the bigger the benefits will be but to give you an idea for most people, the sonic jump more akin to a £10,000+ box swap.

If the budget is tighter than you can opt for the Silver cables but at this level, unless its because of tuning reasons, we do not really advise Erthas below the silver. A Posiedon package with Ertha silvers will save you £640 over the Apollos.

If the system has the transparency and resolution then the Atlantis cables will nearly always be more than worth their extra expenditure. Sure, their cost is a large jump up from the Apollo (£1940 extra) but I think I am right in saying that every single customer of mine who tried both ended up keeping the Atlantis. They really are rather special.

If you stream music then chances are there will be a  router in your system which is connected to a streamer which is in turn connected to your hifi system. The router is a source of a huge amount of noise and is a key area to address in any Entreq application. Not only will your router most likely be in another place or indeed another room, but it should also be grounded to a completely separate box or else it will compromise the functioning of a box that is shared by other components.

So with a Posiedon setup in a streaming system, we advise the addition of a Minimus grounding box and an RJ45 ertha cable to ground your router in complete isolation. We have also found on ocassion that a few systems did not really respond to Entreq grounding until the router was cleaned up first of all.

So there you have it. That’s the very popular Poseidon package explained in full. As ever if there are any questions I am just a phone call or email away and always happy to help. More Entreq blogs very soon.