Shunyata Research Altaira Grounding Hub

Caelin Gabriel, the owner and chief designer at Shunyata developed the Altaira Grounding Hub to be a state of the art solution for controlling ground plane noise in home audio systems. The Altaira is essentially a centralised hub that can remove ground loops and dramatically reduce ground noise, typically the sort of noise that can cause buzzing, humming and other similar unwanted pollutants. Electrical grounds are rife with noise, interference from devices in the home such as routers, microwave ovens, chargers for devices such as mobile phones, laptops, smart lights and suchlike.

The Altaira has 6 grounding posts on the back, plus a 7th post designed to connected to either the ground earth terminal on a Shunyata Power Conditioner or the ground pin on an unused wall socket.

The Altaira connects to the chassis ground of each of the components in your system and drains away noise and pollutants into the Altaira, when this noise reaches the Altaira it is dissipated via Shunyata’s proprietary filtering technology which they employ with the hubs. In addition to this you also give each component in your system that you connect a true reference ground point.

I talk about lowering/reducing noise frequently and when you do this properly you can make a system much more revealing, increase overall dynamics as and when they are required, but at the same time you make the presentation calmer, more natural, you get improved 3D imaging, better tonal accuracy and for want of a better expression you make the music simply sound correct. Grain and glare is stripped away and you get to hear more into the music.

The Altaira Ground Hub was designed to be expandable and scaleable if required, they have produced 2 different versions, the Altaira Chassis Ground Hub and the Altaira Segmented Ground Hub, for simple systems with less than 6 components a single Chassis Ground Hub is ideal, each zone of isolation has filters that are tuned and optimised to specifically reduce those frequencies which are most commonly found riding the chassis ground of components.

In larger or more complicated systems you could introduce a segmented grounding hub which can be used isolate digital components away from the main hub.

Shunyata produce a number of different grounding cables of different grades and with termination options that are interchangeable, so if you change a component in your system and need an alternative connector you can simply purchase a new connector and swap it over.

The video below serves as a really useful overview to the Altaira Hubs and how they can be used and configured in a system.

The document below highlights several possible solutions based on the size / complexity of a system, it is fairly generic, but it gives you a good idea of options.

When using a Chassis Ground Altaira there are 3 ways in which you can connect the Altaira to your system:

If you have a Shunyata Power Distributor with a ground terminal  you connect this to the Altaira’s dedicated terminal via a spade to spade ground cable.

If you do not own a Shunyata Power Conditioner you can buy a dedicated Shunyata cable that will connect to the Altaira to the ground pin on a unused wall socket.

If any of the components in your system have a dedicated ground terminal, like the Vitus RI-101, Vitus RD-101 or the Melco N1Z you connect each device to a separate terminal on the Altaira.

However, not all equipment has a dedicated chassis ground terminal and if that is the case there are 2 further options, but this does involve taking some measurements with a multimeter to see if you can use either a chassis screw or an spare input or output (such as RCA, XLR, USB, RJ45 etc) using a Shunyata Ground Tail.

Touch the ground pin on the IEC socket with one probe and touch a chassis screw with the other probe and measure the resistance, if the reading is less than 1 ohm you can use this method to connect with a spade to spade cable, If results measure higher than 1 ohm that connection method is not suitable as it is not a true ground.

The other option is to measure inputs or outputs, such as RCA, XLR, USB or RJ45 in the same method outlined above. This is a more popular method than a chassis screw connection as not everyone is comfortable loosening a chassis screw (which is understandable!)

If a component in your system does not have a ground pin on the IEC socket it is unsuitable to connect to a Chassis Ground Altaira

The Altaira can have quite a profound effect on system performance, all systems contain noise – even those which sound superb, but it is not until this noise is removed that you can fully appreciate how much more performance can be gained. There is no waiting around for things to settle, the effect it brings is instant and so everyone who has listened to the Altaira to date has heard what it does.

Using a Shunyata Altaira in system may appear a little daunting to some due to the fact you need to take measurements, I can imagine a few customers being put off by that approach, but once you break it down it is actually very straightforward.

This clearly isn’t a product that would be purchase blind by someone, so please get in touch for more information!!