Okay to use RCA adapter on a fully balanced amp?

@blkwrxwgn , you should be able to drive the amp single-ended using an adapter. I would expect that your amplifier would sound the same driven balanced or single ended based on the statement above.

I trust your judgment, It's also not my final amp, there will be upgrading and I'm sure not all will be fully balanced.

Here’s the part that concerns me about this amp possibly not having a "true" differential input, despite earlier verbiage:

If a balanced connection cannot be used, note that the amp cannot be driven to full power from a 2-volt single-ended output, the limit of most receivers. You leave half the power on the table.

Maybe it’s a real differential input and the amp simply has a very low sensitivity that requires more than 2 Volts to hit its full rated power output (i.e. use a single ended preamp with some gain, or a DAC with some extra gain, and you’re golden). Or maybe it actually DOESN’T have a differential input, and half of the amp’s 4 phases will be sitting at 0 whenever you use RCA-to-XLR adapters.

We’re trying to derive precise meaning from their verbiage, which could be either partially erroneous or easily misinterpreted. I’d contact the company for clarification.

I just received my Orchard Audio Starkrimson amp today and this is what I purchased with it to convert the balanced to unbalanced and it also supplies an extra 8db of gain

Stereo RCA to XLR Converter (orchardaudio.com)

Here’s the part that concerns me about this amp possibly not having a "true" differential input, despite earlier verbiage:

If a balanced connection cannot be used, note that the amp cannot be driven to full power from a 2-volt single-ended output, the limit of most receivers. You leave half the power on the table.

@mulveling According to their website, the amp is fully differential and balanced from input to output. Its a bit hard to imagine, but it is possible that the input stage has a really poor CMRR (Common Mode Rejection Ratio) which would cause it to be more distorted and lower power when run with a single-ended source. But its hard to imagine that they would know to do balanced and get the CMRR thing so bad in that light- although I have seen that sort of thing happen.

At any rate it won't hurt to try! If the CMRR is anywhere near what we've been getting with our amps over the last 45 years it won't be any problem at all.

I have experienced what the OP is talking about. That is why I purchased the active adapter in my previous post