XLR ics from RCA ones?

I have several pairs of Musical Fidelity NuVista ICs which I've made up myself from a longish roll of the cable I got a while back. They're al RCA terminated with Bullet plugs atm but I will soon be needing some balanced ICs.

The NuVista cable is a coaxial cable with a central conductor and two braided shields separated by a layer of PTFE. Now on the RCA cables I've just twisted the two sheilds together to use for the return but could I use them separately and make a balanced cable out of them?

Michael.

 

so you have:

centre, screen 1, screen 2

going from inner core to outer layer?? Thats 3 conductors?
Are you thinking of using the centre wire as ground?
You would have no noise rejection because the signal
is on the outer screen and would pickup kak while the
inner screen would see a different signal. Balanced works
because the 2 inputs [hot and cold] see identical intereference
and the wire properties are closely matched. The balanced circuit
subtracts the noise on the cold input from the noise on the hot and - voila! interference vanishes [or more correctly, is cancelled out].
If the 2 wires are non identical properties, the noise will not be
identical and therefore kak(A) - kak(B) will be non-zero...

In theory you should use identical wires for the inputs, but who's to say what will make it sound better or worse..? As long as the 3 wires are seperate it won't fry anything to try it

 

Correct. I was thinking of using the centre wire as the "hot" wire but now I've read your post I realise why that's a bit silly.

I think I'll just get some proper balanced cables when the time comes

Michael.