Missing out on drums?

[LostTurntabl]

Okay, so after much fiddling I realized I have two separate problems.

1. The lack of a high end. That's my stylus.
2. The overall muddiness of the sound. That's my preamp. For some reason the ART USB Phono Plus is making my music sound garbled and subdued, like it's being recorded underwater. It's not super noticeable, but the second I hooked up a dinky old preamp to my system, everything sounded brighter.

So the problem now is how do I hook this up to my computer. I have an old MCM solid state pre-amp that should work fine, but I can't figure out how to ground the effing thing. Whenever I plug it in I get a constant, clicking hum, as well as radio signals. My turntable does NOT have a ground wire, so I cannot figure out how to ground this thing.

Reading forum post after forum post, no one can ever seem to explain how to ground a pre-amp if your turntable doesn't have a ground wire, so I'll open the floor here. My setup: turntable, pre-amp, computer. Where do I connect the ground wire?

 

[dumptruck]

Hmm, I can't imagine what "clicking hum" means, but whatever it is plus RF pickup is pretty bad. I have to wonder if there's some problem in there causing an ultra high impedance connection... Do you get all this noise when it's connected to an amp instead of your computer?

Ignoring that, are you talking about a ground wire from your preamp? You can freely experiment with touching that to the anything without power on it: cases and outer RCA (ring) connections of the whole chain (until the speakers - don't go touching it to the speaker terminals). Probably start with metal parts of the turntable. The reason you haven't found an explanation is that even though it's on the preamp, the whole purpose of that connection is to ground the turntable in the same place as the preamp, and if the turntable is designed to operate without an external ground connection, you aren't supposed to need it.

 

[Njoy-Music]

As I understand it, the TT should be grounded to either the phono preamp or the preamp if you're using it's internal phono section. You do not need to ground the preamp itself. As mentioned above there is some problem with that old preamp that is causing all the noise. I'd suggest a different preamp or a different phono pre of which there seems to be numerous threads recently about not just the ART but many low cost options to use if you're not having success with the USB version. I'd read some of those to look at the many alternatives you can consider. Once you get the clean signal you're after then you can look at various ways to go from the preamp to your PC.