Amp recommendation and setup advice please

your comment about eliminating or minimizing the effect of interconnect, could you please elaborate? I own an ARC Ref6 and ARC Ref150se and I keep getting advice from certain dealers that I should upgrade my IC between the two. I will say this; I have four XLR IC's at my disposal at unless it's in my head, they do sound different! Does this mean my Ref6 is not good at it's job? My question is posed with nothing but earnest sincerity.

@fsonicsmith  The balanced line system has a set of standards which are in part there to eliminate noise and also to reduce cable interactions. This is why in the recording studio it unusual to see really expensive cables, simply because the differences are inaudible.

If the equipment does not support the balanced standard, then cable differences can be heard. Audio Research to the best of my knowledge has never supported the standard (also known as Audio Engineering Society file 48) but that is actually pretty common in high end audio.

The aspects that make the cable more audible are:
1) output impedance- if this is high, more cable artifacts (IOW the character of the cable) can be heard.
2) In the balanced standard, ground is ignored and is only used for shielding. In this way no ground currents pass through the shield of the cable. What this means is that the signal occurs between pin 2 and 3 of the XLR connection and floats with respect to ground.

In an ARC preamp and a number of others, the inverted and non-inverted signals do have their output with respect to ground  and not to each other. This causes the cable to become an audible portion of the overall system sound. One advantage of this is that either output can be used to drive an RCA connection just by hooking up the RCA connector. What this means is that such a setup is really just two single ended connections that are simply out of phase with each other, which is not actually how balanced line is supposed to work- its signal does have the two aspects out of phase with each other, but its not a pair of single-ended outputs. I hope I have explained this in a way that is easy to understand.

Sorry for my slow response- I only just now found your question.

Essentially, a preamp is used for several things:

- As a way to switch between multiple sound sources (i.e. CD player, tape, etc.)

- Be able to provide a way to adjust volume

- Contains a circuit that has enough current to drive certain amps (sometimes digital sources do not have enough current in the analog output circuits).

You missed one- the line stage is also used to reduce or eliminate the effects of the interconnect cable. This is probably the least understood function of the line stage.