Building balanced interconnects--ideas

FWIW, the whole idea behind balanced line cables was/is to make it so that the cable does not have an artifact- regardless of the cost of the cable.

To accomplish this there is actually a standard that has been in place for the last 60 years or so.

IOW, if you do it right you won't need particularly high-end materials like you do with RCAs.

With regards to the shield, if in doubt attach it to pin 1 at both ends of the cable.

Great information! I am leaning toward three identical wires, each shielded with its own braid. The wire could float in a teflon tube, or it could have a foamed teflon insulaton, such as the VH AirLock. Please tell me this--is a single, solid conductor superior to stranded wire in this situation? And, I am running these interconnects directly from a GNSC Wadia 861SE into monoblock amps, so is the larger gauge more appropriate? Thanks to all for your valued experience.

Don't shield the wires separately. You want the twisted pair to have a common shield.

Thanks, Atmasphere--I am thinking of a carbon-infused nylon braid on each teflon tube, not a metal foil. All are then braided loosely for strength and appearance. I have used Flexo Conductive on power cables, and they are very quiet. How good is Kimber's bulk wire vs Cardas? Neither ever mention Ohno Continuous Cast, but claim to be hyper-pure and soft-annealed, etc. I have to have OOC certified wire by prior experience.

Jafreeman, the issue here is that if you put signal (ground) current through the shield, you can wind up with undesirable effects. In a balanced cable, the signal should only appear between pin2 (non-inverted) and pin3 (inverted) of the XLR. IOW ground should be ignored.

Quite often in high end audio the tenants of the paragraph above get ignored. The result is really expensive cables, or a lot of work put into the cables for no real benefit. If you run separate shields, you will loose a lot of the Common Mode Refection Ratio afforded at the input to the amplifier! IOW use a common shield- it will work better- noise gets into the cable, you **want** it to affect the inverted and non-inverted phases equally! If this does not happen the cable could well have more noise.