Chord Company Phono Aray turntable grounding device
‘Stay grounded’ has become an audiophile touchstone – not in the sense of resisting the urge to upgrade (never gonna happen) but making arguably the most vital upgrade there is: lowering your system’s noise floor. The proliferation of grounding/earthing products with that specific aim speaks to a growing appreciation of a true and simple foundational benefit. Noise reduces resolution, masks detail. Lose the noise, close in on the holy grail of hi-fi: realism. Surely a worthy ambition if ever there was.
That said, the Chord Company, based just a few miles from the mysteries of Stonehenge in Wiltshire, perhaps isn’t easily going to convince those snake oil citing sceptics railing against ‘hi-fi’s dark arts’ with its new and frankly unlikely contribution to the noise cancelling cause named Phono Aray.
The company, best known for its extensive range of speaker cables and interconnects, already sells items such as the English Electric EE1 Plus ‘advanced network noise isolator’ and – something I have connected to a spare ethernet port at the back of my wi-fi router, looking remarkably like I tried to stab it with an expensive aluminium pen – the Ground Aray. When streaming, I think it does some good. Then again, the snake oil patrol would doubtless argue that, as an audiophile, I’m open to persuasion.
Maybe I am. And, indeed, happy to entertain the idea that my turntable’s performance can be improved along similar lines. The Chord Company argues it thus. The engineering needed to retrieve the tiny signals stored on a vinyl record makes many turntables sensitive to electromagnetic radiation emitted from external sources within a domestic environment. For example, the signal from a low output moving coil cartridge will typically be amplified 1,000,000 times before it reaches the loudspeakers.
A wire-is-a-wire-is-a-wire
The Chord Co says it’s been tackling interference issues for much of its 40 years in business, initially via advanced shielding technology, more recently with products such as the Ground Aray, Power Aray and Powerhaus mains distribution blocks. The Phono Aray addresses the idea that the skinny earthing cable that comes with most turntables’ tonearm interconnects to eradicate hum has the unintended consequence of joining with the tonearm itself (if it has some metal in it) to become an antenna, only too eager to pick up any localised high frequency radiation from switch-mode power supplies, wi-fi and the like and feed it to the ground-plane of your system, thus obscuring the all-important really, really small stuff. The wire-is-a-wire-is-a-wire posse stagger back in disbelief.
As a slice of lateral thinking, the Phono Aray deserves a ripple of applause. As a physical presence, it just about gets away with its £1,000 price tag, too. Fashioned from CNC’d aluminium billet, dressed in black, chunky and semi-cylindrical, it looks like a giant capacitor with a 4mm speaker-like banana socket at each end, one with a screw collar to accommodate a spade termination. The short (50cm) run of high-quality screened lead that comes in the box has a matching banana-type plug at one end and a spade connector at the other.
Positioning the Phono Aray between turntable and phono stage is simple enough to be intuitive and takes less than a minute. First, unscrew the tonearm’s grounding lead from the terminal of your phono stage or, if it’s incorporated, amp, and connect it to the Phono Aray’s screw-collared socket. Take the supplied lead’s banana plug, insert it in the Phono Aray’s remaining socket and connect the other end to the recently vacated grounding terminal on your phono stage or amp. Good to go.
Aray isn’t so much a specific Chord Co technology as the name given to several of its best proprietary innovations that, like the secret ingredients of Coke and KFC, are never divulged in detail. What can be said of the Phono Aray is that inside is a hand-wound, ultra-high-current filter joining the terminals at each end and ‘a complex Aray system, connected in parallel, that gives added sound security and provides an effective double “virtual earth system” for both turntable and phono stage’. The thick-walled aluminium casing is said to provide good electrical and acoustic isolation, while the chamber itself is filled with a resin to reduce microphony, when mechanical vibrations are transformed into unwanted electrical signal/noise. Also helping to combat this are two large but lightweight decoupled isolation feet that must be loosened off for the full decoupling effect.
Sound quality
I was surprised to read a report of the Phono Aray making material sound subjectively louder with greater musical energy. This wasn’t my experience with the Phono Aray placed between an Acoustic Signature Double X Neo turntable with TA2000 arm and MCX3 moving coil cartridge and a Chord Electronics Huei phono stage. If anything, things seemed a little quieter for a given volume setting, the musical energy not necessarily increasing overall but being more discerningly distributed throughout any given mix. The most notable changes seem to be upticks in refinement, sophistication and finesse, a bit like going from an excellent moving magnet cartridge to a decent moving coil, the impact realised in timbre, texture and micro-dynamic nuance rather than front-foot punch.
The heavyweight German turntable is no slouch when it comes to the beguiling presentation of detail, ably assisted here by the Huei. Even without the Phono Aray, an outstanding amount of information is present in the signal, but it’s integrated and weighted so well you’re barely aware of it. The music is allowed to communicate without being snagged or manipulated by the mechanics of its reproduction. With the chunky Chord cylinder in situ, however, treble seems cleaner, entirely free from grain and fatiguing components and, from top to bottom, the sound is largely defined by its lucid, easy breathing delivery.
It’s an ‘un-edgy’ listen, a product of the phenomenon when you relax into the temperature/tension/power/emotional grip of music with a sense of coherence rather than being distracted by separate sonic strands. A good example is an album called The Summit, a take-no-prisoners live set that pits old masters Manhattan Transfer against new tonsils on the block, Take 6, in a vocal harmony showdown. The flat-out, all-voices-on-deck climax is a searching test challenging the replay system to keep a scrum of powerfully meshed voices and fully lit backing band properly separated, dynamically convincing and tonally believable. Sans Phono Aray, the sound is certainly charged and forceful, capturing the attack and live excitement of the ego-fuelled finale, but it doesn’t forgive the slightly raw edge present in the recording. Reinstating the Phono Aray sheds none of the thrill but smooths that raw edge and brings more warmth and body to the occasion while enhancing the tonal realism of the competing voices.
Conclusion
Expectation bias? Not a chance. Do you absolutely need one? Probably not. But if you do borrow a Phono Aray from your local Chord Co dealer, I’d be surprised if it didn’t stay put in exchange for the requisite £1,000. As upgrades go, it really is on a par with changing your cartridge or phono stage for something superior that reveals more of what’s buried in the grooves of your record collection and puts you in touch with the finer things in musical life.