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Balanced or single ended leads from your arm.

While cartridges have balanced output at the pins, not many head amps can accept balanced inputs. It seems as though with longer lines, it will be easier to position the table where it just works better in the room when balanced lines eliminate hummmmm.

What hase been your experience in this situation; balanced out, single ended out with no adverse effects.

thanks Ken
kftool

Showing 3 responses by dgarretson

dgarretson
2,617 posts
 
George, I spoke with BAT today and Vladimir confirmed that because the original P10 is not balanced in the first gain stage, its does sound better and offers higher SNR using RCA inputs instead of XLR. As you mentioned, the P10SE has a fully-balanced first gain stage, and sounds better through its XLR input. It's $2K to belly up for the upgrade...
dgarretson
2,617 posts
 
This can be a bit tricky, as a phono cartridge is not a true-balanced source(this would require +/- phases referenced separately to ground, or a total of five pins instead of the four found in a cartridge). My BAT P10 phono stage has both RCA & XLR inputs, and a fully balanced internal design. Nevertheless, BAT recommended using RCA inputs into the phono stage, and let the phono stage derive a balanced signal at the input and process balanced through to the XLR outputs. There is a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio when dividing the output of the cartridge coils for an XLR connection. Also Hovland recommended that I terminate their phono cable RCA rather than XLR. They preferred the sound of low-mass RCA plugs to heavier-mass XLRs. So your results may vary depending upon cable & phono stage designs.
dgarretson
2,617 posts
 
Jfrech, here is a post that Victor Komenko of BAT made awhile back that sums up his view on the matter. The 6db advantage in SNR actually goes to the SE connection between the TT & the phono stage.

http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=vinyl&n=31747&highlight=balanced+phono+cable&r=&session=
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