Balanced Preamp recommendations up to $5,500

You seem to have answered my question. That, it would benefit me to have the Tri-planar arm cable terminated with XLRs as long as I had appropriate inputs to plug into at the preamp or phonostage

@nkonor, If the phono section is actually balanced differential, yes. Its hard to imagine that it would not be, given how much dealers over the years have resisted using balanced connections on the phono! If you are comparing preamps for a customer, its a lot harder if one uses a different input connector. So it won't be there on a phono input unless it really works.

So the advantage is that the tone arm cable will simply not add or subtract from the signal in any way, which is quite unlike a single-ended connection where the cable can and will editorialize on whatever is going through it.

Seems to me if there is only one place to have a balanced connection, the phono is the place to do it. You'll get more of the signal and less of what isn't, which is what we are all after- the music.

I've heard both the 9.5" and 12" arms on the Technics SP10 MkIII, if the 10R is anything like that it will be one of the best arm/turntable combinations at any price. A lot does depend on how well Technics executes their plinth! I am looking forward to it...

@asp307

I hate to say it (and also a bit surprised, given the source), but this statement is actually false:

”Probably because there are no phono cartridges with a center tap (6-wires) . So in terms of what we do with a balanced circuit you'd have to emulate that imaginary mid point.. At those signal levels it's always been a step backwards at the first gain stage. The super-symmetry circuit does that quite nicely but only at higher signal levels. Secondary is SE cables generally have lower reactance per foot than balanced cables.”

You don't need or want 6 wires to do a balanced connection!! - you need only 2 for one channel, for a total of 4. The tone arm ground acts as the shield of the interconnect cable and. Collectively, these connections are then pins 2 and 3 of the XLRs of each channel, and pin 1 of both channels (shield) is the tone arm ground. If there were a center tap (and if it were used) it would actually **degrade** the balanced performance. Instead, the input circuit is built to ignore ground and only amplify what is different between the inverting and noninverting inputs, which in this case are the pins of a normal cartridge.

I think Nelson knows this, my surmise is the answer given to you didn't come from him.

To take advantage of the balanced nature of the cartridge, and also the balanced differential nature of a phono preamp, the XLR connection must be used as it does not unbalance the signal in any way, whereas an RCA connector does. So while cleeds' answer above is mostly correct, the bit about the XLR connector as I have mentioned here should be recognized.

Our preamps have had XLR inputs for the phono since they were first introduced in 1989.

^^ +1

What about true balanced (ie, dual mono) tube HIGH BANDWIDTH preamp? Does such a thing exist on the face of the Earth?

@madavid0 Yes, but to be clear dual mono and true balanced are two different things.

Our MP-3 preamp is based on the first balanced preamp circuit ever sold to high end audio (our MP-1). It has a direct-coupled output (despite being a tube preamp) and has bandwidth to about 400KHz.