Balanced vs RCA between amp/preamp

Beating a dead horse...

Balanced are designed for professional use. That is why they are designed with the ground making contact first- professional use sees a lot of stuff being connected/disconnected while powered up. Making the ground connection first avoids the loud annoying buzz you get with RCA. Which with home use is a non-issue, you simply power off or even just change inputs to avoid the noise. Now if you have 20 roadies running around messing with the 768 connections in your system then balanced makes a lot of sense.

Balanced is locking because pro gear tends to get moved around a lot. So get balanced if you like to throw your system in a truck and set up at friends a lot. If your system stays in the room for years at a time then XLR is a total waste of money.

True balanced utilizes two duplicate sets of circuitry, the outputs of which are then compared in order to reject noise. That's how it works. One of the bedrock fundamental truths of high end audio is simpler is better. Another is better parts cost more and the fewer the parts the more you can spend on each part. So this one is not only wasted but by unnecessary duplication its actually counter productive. Except for professional use where runs long enough to go from your pre-amp out the door around the house and back into the room to your amp are the norm. If that's your system go balanced. Totally. Otherwise, another feature wasted on home use.

What else? Oh yeah. Like the man said half the time balanced doesn't really even mean balanced. It just means you can connect your XLR here. Decoy! Fell for it! Don't be that guy.

How many even knew all the above? So on top of everything else balanced turns you into one of these gear heads talking the talk instead of walking the walk.

None of this is new. I went through figuring this all out 30 years ago, at least. Not one damn thing has changed in all that time.

Go and listen. You will see.

BALANCED VS. UNBALANCED ANALOG INTERFACES

https://benchmarkmedia.com/blogs/application_notes/balanced-vs-unbalanced-analog-interfaces?_pos=1&_sid=87340c17d&_ss=r


With the Benchmark gear I had in the past it was XLR for best sound. 

First you must determine if your equipment is truly differentially balanced or it just has balanced connectors.  I now this topic has been covered umpteen times previously on these forums; try reading the white papers of Nelson Pass (Pass Labs) , Victor Khomenko (BAT)  Ralph Karsten ( Atmasphere) or Charlie Hansen (Ayre) to get an explanation from renown experts not just the ones who frequent these forums.

@shannere 
+1.

Balanced are designed for professional use. That is why they are designed with the ground making contact first- professional use sees a lot of stuff being connected/disconnected while powered up. Making the ground connection first avoids the loud annoying buzz you get with RCA. Which with home use is a non-issue, you simply power off or even just change inputs to avoid the noise. Now if you have 20 roadies running around messing with the 768 connections in your system then balanced makes a lot of sense.

Balanced is locking because pro gear tends to get moved around a lot. So get balanced if you like to throw your system in a truck and set up at friends a lot. If your system stays in the room for years at a time then XLR is a total waste of money.

True balanced utilizes two duplicate sets of circuitry, the outputs of which are then compared in order to reject noise. That's how it works. One of the bedrock fundamental truths of high end audio is simpler is better. Another is better parts cost more and the fewer the parts the more you can spend on each part. So this one is not only wasted but by unnecessary duplication its actually counter productive. Except for professional use where runs long enough to go from your pre-amp out the door around the house and back into the room to your amp are the norm. If that's your system go balanced. Totally. Otherwise, another feature wasted on home use.

What else? Oh yeah. Like the man said half the time balanced doesn't really even mean balanced. It just means you can connect your XLR here. Decoy! Fell for it! Don't be that guy.

A good deal of this is false. First- the ground. The ground connection is not made first (ground is pin 1 of the XLR). The reason you can hot plug an XLR connection is because both signal pins connect at the same time (along with the ground). The input is far less able to pick up noise during the connection- no buzz, most of the time not even a pop.


Balanced operation has several nice benefits for home operation. Audiophiles often pay a lot for cables; if the balanced line system is set up properly (IOW the equipment used supports the Balanced Line standard, a.k.a. AES48) the sound of the interconnect won't be a thing. No having to audition cables- it will just work. So cables don't have to be expensive and you can run them longer distances (this is helpful if you have monoblock amps, you can place them by the speakers and keep your speaker cables short, which improves definition).


True balanced circuits do not have duplicate circuitry. So there aren't twice as many parts and so on. We use differential amplifiers in our circuits and because differential amps tend to be lower noise we don't need as much gain stages to get the job done. As a result with our gear there are only 4 stages of gain from the LOMC phono input to the loudspeakers. That is **a simpler signal path** than most single-ended circuits! Balanced operation can (and usually is) done with transformers, in which case the preamp and amps can be single-ended and it can still work quite well.

Other than immunity to interconnect cable artifacts, the other reason for balanced lines is elimination of ground loop noise. That is a benefit whether the cable is 60 feet or only 6 inches.


Now if the amp has balanced inputs processed by circuitry that hands off the signal to the actual single-ended input of the amp (I've seen this in a few consumer grade amps with balanced inputs) then it may well be that the system will sound better with the single ended inputs, simply because there is a simpler signal path. But if the system is internally balanced there won't be any looking back, it will simply sound better.