Balanced Line

Richard Dunn

Richard Dunn

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What is this nonsense about. I have recently had loads of enquiries about this, it seems to have become the latest hi-fi bullshit

I have designed for both pro and domestic markets and so I understand the process. I cannot see any necessity for balancing line interconnects unless they are high cap and over 3m length or you have active speakers at the opposite end of your room to the pre-amp. It is perfectly understandable in high rf and hum pick-up environments with long cable runs as in studios and pa rigs, but in domestic hi-fi it is a nonsense. It is just more components to get in the way of the music. Either an active balancing circuit or a balancing transformer (balun) is needed as all circuits used in audio are naturally single ended apart from most amplifier output stages.
 
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Richard Dunn said:
What is this nonsense about. I have recently had loads of enquiries about this, it seems to have become the latest hi-fi bullshit

I have designed for both pro and domestic markets and so I understand the process. I cannot see any necessity for balancing line interconnects unless they are high cap and over 3m length or you have active speakers at the opposite end of your room to the pre-amp. It is perfectly understandable in high rf and hum pick-up environments with long cable runs as in studios and pa rigs, but in domestic hi-fi it is a nonsense. It is just more components to get in the way of the music. Either an active balancing circuit or a balancing transformer (balun) is needed as all circuits used in audio are naturally single ended apart from most amplifier output stages.
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i agree totally,
 
Yep. Good enough is good enough.

AV Amps with very decent DACs and remote controls can be switched into "pure direct" stereo mode and four of the 7x100w on board amps can be used to drive a pair of conventional stereo speakers in bi-amped mode.

Lots of clean power, low noise and an excellent DAC. Such a box from a far east volume producer can give snazzy brands a run for their (loads of) money.

Attach a suitable computer to the front and remarkable results can be had for a song.

Good enough is good enough!
 
balanced seems to pop up every few years. people change components in order to get a ''fully balanced system''

super duper
 
Fully balanced here. All pro gear though-that said it does remove all that stupid interconnect swapping nonsense.
 
Ditto here, nearly fully balanced expect turntable, phono stage and SUT. Although I could make SUT and arm balanced. Have consumer version of Adam Active S2A monitors the Compact Classic. True that perfectly good Van Damme Balanced leads were only £36 inc vat p&p for 10m pair which is much less than decent speaker cable.

Paul
 
While I agree with Richard, this did get me thinking so I'd like to throw a question at him or anyone else for that matter.

Outside of pro use, lots of people use balanced because they say it sounds better.
So here we have a subjective observation. Rarely do folk go into the technical reasons to support this observation.

Richard, in quite rightly questioning the practice you are doing so with technical argument. How would you answer all of those people who claim that balanced sounds better?

For me this is a good example of where the rules defining different camps within audio are blurred :)
 
Richard Dunn said:
Why?
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Because in my experience 'cable' differences disappear.

As remarked above runs of pretty standard VanDamme does a fantastic job-good enough to show source/dac cable differences up-line say between Missing link cryo and Digital Soundpipe(I much prefer the latter btw).
Anyway you're the expert-you tell me ;-)

BM DAC1 into (on t'other side of music room )XTA 226 into 3x MC2 Power amps
 
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RobHolt said:
Richard, in quite rightly questioning the practice you are doing so with technical argument. How would you answer all of those people who claim that balanced sounds better?
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That they are deaf :D

Well it might well be they prefer the sound of the equipment, but then again they might prefer it more if it wasn't balanced, but they have no choice. Very few people manage to make a direct comparison, where as I have. I had a balancing circuit from Tresham Audio days, as the applications for the pro amps did need balancing. So when I put together the nva circuit I tried it with and without the balancing circuit, and clearly the balanced circuit took away some clarity and definition, subjectively. Had I had 50ft cable runs then the single ended cables clearly would take away more clarity and definition than the balanced circuit did. It is horses for courses and this present desire to use pro designed gear in domestic situations doesn't take this into account.

Why try to compensate for a problem when you don't have the problem.
 
cooky1257 said:
Because in my experience cable differences disappear. As remarked above runs of pretty standard VanDamme does a fantastic job-good enough to show cable differences up-line say between Missing link cryo and Digital Soundpipe(I much prefer the latter btw).
Anyway you're the expert-you tell me ;-)
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In my experience they don't, all balancing does is remove noise it doesn't change cable sonic characteristics. But some cables are noisier than others that is part of the differences, and balancing does remove that. Everything is compromise in audio. Just do the job you have to do, and if you have inherently noisy cables, even in short cable runs, as with some "shotgun" configurations or unscreened cables then balancing would be better, but even better would be a good sounding cable that didn't need it in the first place.
 
One of the reasons I bought my Quad 77 stack all those years ago was the Quadbus. I only had speaker cables to think about - they are no fuss no nonsense 4 sq mm cables the German HiFi shop gave me with the Quarts. The German equivalent of B and Q stock similar stuff today - 79 strand, but thicker.

I think the Quadbus links are balanced throughout, but the "cable" is only about three inches long! But I suppose, if you are designing from scratch for an integrated system, it's almost as easy and as cheap to work balanced.

Now I only use the Quad 77 as a power amp, with an un-balanced cable from the Beresford DAC-Pre to an auxiliary input of the Quad integrated amp.

But for many years the quad stack was in full daily use, and I never thought about it. I just pushed the buttons and it made music.
 
Labarum said:
I think the Quadbus links are balanced throughout, but the "cable" is only about three inches long! But I suppose, if you are designing from scratch for an integrated system, it's almost as easy and as cheap to work balanced.
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No its not, it is a nonsense. All audio circuits are single ended at the junction between gain or control stage, you have to *add* extra circuitry to make that balanced, and 3 inches is again just plain daft, there are longer connection than that internal in the amps that aren't balanced, so it was just a marketing guff.
 
Well, I work in an industry where balanced is king, single ended is 'noddy'.
At the very least the ability to 'reject' noise should make it the better interconnection for low level signals like Phono stages.
 

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