At the risk of interrupting the CLC marathon (which has been quite enjoyable seeing the great since of humor that you all seem to have).
I am building a switching box for choosing different amps and different cd-dvd transports & players. I purchased some RCA female jacks for "chassis-mount application" . I am mounting the jacks and the toggle switches on 1/8" aluminum plate that will become the front and back of the unit. When I received them I noticed that when installed the negative or common or ground wire that is soldered to the jack is upon installation in contact with the aluminum plate. I looked a some other jacks and found some are insulated from the chassis while others are not (and some cost 50 cents and others cost $50. Does is matter if wire that would be the common is connected with all the other wires through the metal mounting plate?
I can only guess that it is like the common wire in a 110v system where they all connect to the buss bar in the breaker panel with the ground wires.
I was going to insulate them from the aluminum plate but considering there 48 of them to do, I thought I would ask some of the electro-outlaws here for there thoughts on this.
It may be like this on all of my equipment but it just doesn't seem like all of the common wires in the signal paths should be connected together. What do ya think?

Brad

It's probably intentional to form a single common. I deal with dataloggers (from weather stations) and all of our various signals come together to a common bus. It's not unusual at all. That being said, I don't claim to be an expert at all when it comes to the insides of a/v gear. I would imagine the principles are the same, but I don't know what kinds of interference may be introduced that wouldn't bother the kinds of applications I'm using that may be detrimental to here.

In a lot of gear the shields of connections are all connected via the chassis. This is not terribly uncommon. Depending on how things are grounded it could lead to a ground loop situation, but as Outlaw gear doesn't have earth ground terminals on most of their equipment it is less likely to be an issue.

If done properly, this can be referred to as a star ground type configuration.