How to go from RCA to XLR?

Rwwear, if you have only a single-ended source, get a transformer from Jensen to convert from SE to balanced. That will assure that there will be no issues.

I agree Atmo. I value your opinion and would like to ask what you think of a plan I have. I have a Citaion II that has been almost completely updated. It sounds great but would benefit from more power. I would like to find another and convert them to balanced mono by using the two separate channels of each amp for the positive and negative. Do you see any problems with this plan? Simply converting to mono is easy but I feel balanced would be better.

Hi Rww -- I'm having difficulty envisioning how that would work at all. What would the output configuration be, in terms of how the speakers are hooked up? And what would generate the inverted input signal?

Regards,
-- Al

One channel of the amp will be the positive input the other the negative of the XLR. This will bridge the amp but it will be balanced bridged operation. This is what the Pallidiums and MBLs are I believe. It is a pretty common. One of the outputs to the speakers will be the positve and the other positive output will be the negative or ground. Just like with a bridged stereo amp.

That sounds ok to me at the output side. The speaker would be connected between the two positive output terminals of the amp (I think, although I'm not certain offhand, that you would want to use the 16 ohm taps if you have 8 ohm speakers), and the two negative output terminals of the amp would be left unconnected (they are tied together and to signal ground internally).

On the input side, I think you are saying that you would take your xlr source (transformer or preamp), and construct a cable that ran xlr pin 2 to the center pin of an rca plug, and xlr pin 1 to the ground of that rca plug, and ran xlr pin 3 to the center pin of another rca plug and xlr pin 1 to the ground of that second rca plug. The two rca plugs would then plug into the amp's two rca inputs. Correct?

Or are you saying that you would replace the rca inputs on the amp with an xlr connector that you would install, with pin 1 wired to amp ground, pin 2 to the single-ended signal path of one channel (wherever the center pin of the rca had been wired to), and pin 3 to the single-ended signal path of the other channel?

I think that everything would function either way, but I'm not sure that you would gain all that much in terms of noise rejection, especially if you don't replace the rca input connectors. Balanced inputs reject noise that is present equally on both polarities, but with the two polarities being physically branched off I'm not sure that noise pickup would be really equal. You will gain a lot of power, though.

Regards,
-- Al