Hopefully I'll get here before others who might not be as diplomatic.:
neutral:
Like, say me?
Numero uno, I doubt they can be picked up at a hardware store, but a
ground lift that lifts pin 1 in
XLR is absolutely fine by me.
If you cannot afford to fix your problem without use of a mains
ground lifter, can you afford it when you get sued because someone gets zapped or worse electrocuted because you lifted a mains
ground and something faulted?
There are very few electrical codes in the world that permit the fusing or switching of Earth connections. (We'll ignore substation design here). Basically these hyped up
ground lifters are 2 diodes back to back on the Earth
line - meaning you impose a 0.7 volt
drop across the Earth, effectively
blocking all bar the worst noise.
I would argue that fiddling with the Earth in this way is no different from putting a
switch or
fuse in. The particularly worrying thing is that you will never know until it is too late if the device has failed. I mean no Active or no
Neutral and you don't get
power out. No Earth and nothing tells you there's a problem...
Basically you have a single
point of failure - a dry joint and the thing is lethal and the failure mode is catastrophic. I don't know how many of you have any knowledge of formal
risk assessment, but you multiply severity of failure by likelihood multiplied by likelihood of detection. Let's see now (scale is 1 - 10, 10 is bad, 1 is good):
Severity - 9 (death), Likelihood - 5 (at least a 1% chance), Detection - 10 (no way of detecting failure) = 450 = Immediate action needed.
RA is all subjective, but basically those devices are a law suit on a timer.
In the case of active speakers on sticks
etc where allegedly one can't get common
point of supply for
power,
throw a pin 1 lift in or use an
iso transformer. (Oh how we miss the days of everything being
transformer balanced...)
