XLR waste of time ?

I share Ralph's philosophy on this one. If you buy the right equipment and match it correctly then who cares about cables.

Some equipment designs do not need $100's or $1000's of dollars of cabling to perform perfectly - nor is this type equipment necessarily less resolving.

The important thing is to get equipment that is designed to preserve every detail on the recording while adding as little distortion or noise as possible and whilst minimizing the effect of all extraneous variables (cabling, operating temperature, AC power, humidity, RF/EMI interference etc. etc.) Equipment that is so sensitive that it is influenced by nearly anything and everything is a liability IMHO - it is simply not well designed for accurate audio reproduction of the source.

Frankly, it is a bit of a travesty that the serious design challenges faced by world class audio designers to build outstanding components is even compared or discussed in the same conversation as an piece of wire with two connectors on the end.

There are several orders of magnitude difference in the design & technology required by the component designer versus those simply making cables....but you would not know this from reading the marketing claims of those who just make cables. Some cables seem to run on some kind of 22nd century dilithium crystal technology...

So, your view is that a properly designed balanced cable geometry is inherently better than any single-ended cable geometry, no matter what the design?

Sounds like more philosophy to me, unconfirmed and untested by experience.

Do you have a dealer in the San Francisco area who carries your equipment and has it set up with properly designed cables? At some point I'd be interested in doing a direct comparison with the very very simple single-ended design I have.

Sounds like more philosophy to me, unconfirmed and untested by experience.

Yes you are right. It is mostly the tin-eared folks in pro audio that exclusively use balanced XLR for everything. The philosophy of head bangers with PA speakers is meaty connectors that are unbreakable when used by gorillas. They would be unable to test anything in an A/B comparison anyway, as all of them are deaf from listening too loud for too long.

JJ25,

Keep us posted with what you learn. However, you do realize that your experement does not isolate your cable design as the only variable (which means your test will prove nothing). If you don't understand why, either you have not read the above posts, or you do not comprehend the above posts.

There are no absolutes, and I am 100% certain of this fact.

nrenter---My thought was to do the comparison between the preamp outputs and the amplifiers in the system. Obviously it couldn't be done in a simple and direct way on the front end. As it happens atmasphere's preamp has only XLR outputs. I don't suppose using the RCA tape outputs would make for an appropriate comparison?

But let's suppose, as you suggest, that an appropriate comparison can't be done. Doesn't the position that balanced lines and XLRs are better just remain, as I suggest, an article of faith?

shadorne: There are all sorts of reasons to use balanced lines in a pro audio setting: Long cable distances, greater potential for signal pollution, etc. None of which exists in the typical home audio set-up. Which suggests that experimentation, rather than philosophy, could be a better way to answer the question.

From a rhetorical perspective, the dismissive attitude of so many of the posters here is remarkably similar to religious belief, or to beliefs about global climate change. It's an interesting question to try to figure out the psychological causes of such beliefs, but the beliefs themselves are merely that.