If you scrape off the paint, (good idea)
you should also use an antioxidant joint compound: An example is Nolox™

^I used a dremel lol
But what is that compound stuff your talking about?
What does it do?

It provides a good electrical contact & prevents metal from oxidizing.
Aluminum oxide or iron oxide (rust) depending on the metal.
The oxide builds over time & creates a resistive barrier for the connection.

Can i buy this at autozone or pep boys or home depot?

Home depot will have it for for sure, in the electrical section.

...that was a good idea removing the paint, the more contact area the better.

Well it looks like I'll be ordering a grounding kit later on now.
Great write-up Mike, thanks alot.

I'm not gonna bother scraping off the paint where the connections are screwed in cause I want to be able to remove them in the future without any signs of their existence

Finally -- someone took the time to produce objective results -- nice job.

As decibels are a logarithmic scale... just a 3dB increase is pretty damn significant .. it's not just a [(73-70)/73]x100%=4% increase in intensity... it's roughly twice as much power.

+1,

Wow! Great thinking with the db meter, Mike... 3 db increase is fairly significant too. Incidentally, what frequency tone did you use for your test? Did you use an IASCA disc? Just curious.

Alright cool, i'll get some of that.
Thanks bro

Thanks for all the kudos, guys.

PeterUbers, as much as it seems like the numbers show a doubling of power, it didn't really feel like that during the test. Then again, that's why we have sound meters. My ears were probably already "burning" from listening to all the notes. I should wear ear plugs next time.

The RS meter is supposedly accurate, at lower volume, to +/- 1db, so at the very least there's a +1 db gain with the wires.

I used the notes from here. . For the result shown in the first post, i just used pink noise, which i doubled up with Goldwave, before burning them to disc, to get a longer duration. I also tested out several frequency ranges and they all pretty much fell within the +2/3 db range after the wires.

Call me a skeptic, but I just can't see a 3 db (assuming the increase is from 70 to 73) making that much of a difference.

http://www.proavmagazine.com/industr...ticleID=599360

"If 3 dB is just noticeable, 6 dB can be considered the smallest “loudness upgrade” worth pursuing. A 6 dB increase represents twice the voltage across the loudspeaker, which quadruples the power that must be dissipated as heat."

Nice job... Very thorough test you ran there. Pink noise is probably very good for running this kind of test, since it offers such a broad frequency spectrum while staying at a contant power level for each octave.

very nice of you to post your findings ..

im sure alot of people will find it useful

as well as help their decision making reguarding the purchase of a grounding kit ..

and i see you installed a black betty grounding kit ..

Just bought the kit .. will post my own results as well in a couple weeks... as much as the sound increase (significant or not) is a quantifiable change produced by the grounding kit, I'm more interested in the longevity and improved efficiency it'll provide the drivetrain/tranny... there are definitely noticeable periods where the 1-->2 lag is more pronounced on our Gx... i didn't notice it before, but I'm noticing it now.