I used to have an earth spike in my previous house. I now use the earth into my house, which is a very short run from the incoming feed and has only 0.24 Ohms impedance. I doubt I could even match that with a spike. In any case, everything sounds much better now.

You couldn't match that with a spike since the impedance of the spike is usually around 15 ohm itself and then you have the soil impedance to the nearest transformer earth binding point
You do not have 0.24 ohm resistance to EARTH.  You are talking about a (misnamed) earth loop impedance test.  This measures the impedance between your live phase connection (the brown wire) and the safety ground connection (the green and yellow wire).  It is measuring the impedance to complete the circuit to the neutral leg of the transformer which is bonded to earth at the transformer (and other points along the line).  Since your earth and neutral are bonded at the input to your house, you are measuring the impedance of live to neutral through the green and yellow wire

To measure the impedance to EARTH from your LIVE wire the electrician would have needed to stick a ground spike in the real soil outside.

Noise doesn't "flow away" to earth anyway.

Be very careful about having mixed earth / arrangements as stevec seems to be describing - as Barry pointed out TT arrangements (effectively that isolated ground spike) need RCD protection

The Ben Duncan designed Russ Andrews RF Router that I use to connect the earthing terminal on my Alethea PSU2 Balanced Power Supply to an outside copper rod is described here:-

What is the RF Router?

Grounding the metal casework on your system, by running an earth cable to an earth terminal on your mains socket, PowerBlock or even an additional earth spike, can bring real sonic benefits. By introducing the RF Router to this setup you'll improve its effectiveness even more and, if you're using an earth rod, bring it up to current electrical wiring regulations. The Router works by effectively separating off RF grounding, effectively 'dumping' high frequency noise out of your system. In use in our systems, the RF Router brought about a surprisingly large improvement in sound quality giving a cleaner sound with less 'hash', more solid bass and better soundstage width and depth.

Who should use the RF Router?

Every system that incorporates an additional, external earth rod that is connected to the mains earth should use an RF Router fitted inline between the rod and the earthing point.

The RF Router can also be used very successfully even if you don’t use an external earth rod. Use it to link the casework grounds of your CD player and amplifier, for example, to the earth terminal on the front of our sockets or our mains extensions to ground casework ‘RF’.

About the wiring regulations
The latest (17th) edition of the IEE's Wiring Regulations state that you should now no longer add an additional earth rod to your domestic ring main earth. This is something which was previously allowed and many people have had an additional earth rod installed to improve their system's sound quality. We've developed our RF Router to allow you to continue to use an additional external earth rod and comply with the latest regulations. When installed, it means that your additional earth rod is not directly connected to the mains earth, while ensuring that noise and RF is dumped out of your system.

I've just deleted the post I had in draft cos I had an "aha".  I think I can guess what it is doing.  I guess it takes your ground (with the noise on it) and splits into a path with RF and the safety ground via a filter.  The "RF" goes to your earth spike, whilst voltages below RF ( a mains fault current) continues to have a path to the TN earth.  Pointless (since it relies on the myth that noise "goes away" anywhere) but it appears to maintain the safety connection.  Slightly bizarre, since if noise did "go away" anywhere, it would presumably go away best down the route of lowest impedance, which would be the TN route it is now filtered away from.  But that's audiophile mains tweaking  for you

The irony of this is that if you have noise from your ground coupled to your system , the highest noise will be that directly attributable to the mains at LF and not the relatively insignificant RF stuff.  Filtering the RF stuff, if it does anything at all, leaves you the LF muck still affecting your system.  If you effectively remove (bad term - prevent from entering) all noise on your signal (or get it below an acceptable level) then it makes no odds whether the noise is pure loud LF or a cocktail of loud LF and quieter RF.  This is the irony of most audiophile mains treatments - they change the nature of the noise polluting your system instead of keeping it out.

Effectively, you do if the neutral bonding to earth at intervals along the line is of such low impedance as to be immaterial. Which leads to...


It does if you present it with a path that has a lower effective impedance. This is how passive plug-in filters work: capacitors direct the high frequency noise to a lower impedance (earth), as well as short it across live/neutral, in a delta configuration while having no effect on the 50Hz waveform itself.

More a preferer of alternative solutions.  My experience of good engineers is that they have delivered good results to me personally and when running PT.  To keep paying the bills, they need to continue providing results for their current clients.  I have yet to be impressed by any "mains fiddling" from HiFi enthusiasts.  Indeed quite the opposite.  On the 3 occasions I went to James (Sovereigns) house to listen to his system, there was obvious hum, and nothing in the dedicated spur, huge balanced power supply, and chunky specialist mains leads left me wanting to find out more.  He was a lovely guy, lovely company, we listened to some great music, but the mains guff was just one more in a series of being underwhelmed.

Maybe Wonky will show me otherwise when I see him next.  But you know, after a few dozen times of finding what your engineer friends said checks out when you try it yourself, you start to credit them with understanding what's going on.

Being Nordost, I'm sure it has a reassuringly expensive price to match.