DIY balanced interconnects

Oldears, connect the shield at both ends, which will always be pin 1. Any other connection (or lack of connection) is not standard and could cause troubles. The way it is supposed to work is that there will be no signal current in the ground- all the signal will be in the twisted pair.

The Neglex 2534 is excellent cable; I saw a set beat a pair of $15,000 cables in a system just a few days ago. You will find also that the Neutrik connectors are excellent. A major advantage compared to a lot of high end connectors is that they are built to the right dimensions and with excellent materials. I have seen several 'high end' XLR connectors that had fit problems, and damaged the connectors that they were plugged in to because the fit was too tight.

Balanced lines allow longer cable runs with lower noise and less HF losses, so they still have advantages over single ended, even without termination. However you may well hear differences between cables. To eliminate the audible differences, cable termination is a must. The industry standard for decades has been 600 ohms and is still common today. Most high end audio products do not support driving such a low value without bass response losses or overall output losses due to high output impedance issues. But without the termination, you will hear differences between cables, essentially obviating the main reason for using balanced lines in the first place!

So if you really want to get everything balanced line has to offer (read: no more expensive cables, lengths as long as you want), your equipment should support all aspects of the balanced line standard.

Tvad, you got that right. I've not watched the solid state part of the market, but I know that Roland did support the 600 ohm standard. Generally its fairly easy for semiconductors. Wadia supported it in the old days- I've not kept up with them though.

As far as tubes- in high end to the best of my knowledge we are the only ones that support the standard. There are others that can drive 600 ohms, but there will be a loss of bass response- the output impedance issues I mentioned earlier, IOW the 600 ohm load combined with the output coupling cap will produce a rolloff. There are certain transformer-coupled tube products, like Modwright, that may well support the standard too (if they have a 600 ohm secondary on the output transformer), you would have to check with them to be sure.

The reason we support the standard is we had a lot of exposure to recording/broadcast gear prior to the introduction of the MP-1, and we saw the results. I remember seeing a local recording engineer set up the mics a good 150 feet from the recorder, and the recording was fabulous. Years later I had that event in mind in setting the goal to support the same operation. I think a lot of high end companies got in for other reasons and without that exposure.

The new Rowland preamps, Criterion and Capri, put out much less than 600 ohms.