That's fair. I guess as long as the pressure is minimal then it's a step above the ground spring. Anything that pushes or pressures boards inside the enclosure seems like it would be undesirable in the long run though. But I have never seen a production pedal fail due to either of these options so I admit I am unjustified in my bias.
That's how the electricians do it!
When I lived in Memphis, my house was built in 1926, and the house I have in DC was built in 1930 -- wanna talk about not up to code? Hell my Memphis house had knob and tube wiring. Every time I opened up a wall I got a surprise. Not much different here, but I've lived here for 23 years, and little by little, I've been bringing her up to code.The house I grew up in had an old 1950's water heater that only had two wires, no ground...
Somewhere along the line some electrician realized that wasn't safe and wedged a ground wire into the cover that went over the heating elements.
Wheew, thank goodness for old Sparky, for a minute there (okay, like 60 years) that thing wasn't up to code!
Ironically, knob and tube is fairly safe compared to some of the things I've seen. With knob and tube, you just need to add a ground -- and in those old houses, you have a network of radiant heat piping that can provide your ground. Some of the most dangerous stuff I have seen is in houses built in the late 60s and 70s with aluminum wiring and Federal Pacific (or as a lot of electricians refer to them -- Federal Pathetic) breaker boxes. Talk about a fire hazard...
I recall a few Zinsco models from that era that were pretty bad as well.
That whole era was bad. The first house I owned was built in the 70s, and I was scared to live there because of what was inside the walls. I'll take a historic house any day over that.
I worked for a few years reconditioning/rebuilding those big power circuit breakers (the ones the size of a dorm sized refrigerator and larger). In our shop we saw the good, the bad and the ugly in breakers built anytime over the last 100 years.
The only ground loops I had with pedals was back in the day, I had one of those DOD steel pedalboards that the pedals bolted to. So you had pedals all bussed with common ground plane, then connected with patch cables and of course the power supply was non-isolated so you had that ground path, and since the power supply had a grounded cable, you also had that ground path to the amp.
