Grounding of Switchcraft Tip Shunt jacks

[mike60510]

I recently installed some Switchcraft tip shunt input jacks in an amp. Is it best practice to connect the tip shunt and the sleeve (ground) lugs together? The sleeve lugs of the original jacks were not run to a grounded. They were just grounded through the physical connection to the chassis.

[Tom Phillips]

That's OK unless your design requires that the jack be electrically isolated from the chassis. Many amps, especially vintage ones, use the mechanical ground.

[mhuss]

Yes, the shunts should connect to sleeve (which is ground/earth) -- for a single input amp. The point behind these shunts is to ground the input to the amp when no plug is inserted. HOWEVER, if you have two inputs on a single channel, you have to do some jiggery pokery with resistors (see any classic Fender amp for an example of how to do this), or else when you plug into one jack, the other will still be shorted.