Balanced preamp recommendations

Rushton,

Although I'm not an engineer that has technically examined this, I've anecdotally found a system whose components are ALL balanced to show slight but significantly higher performance than a system that uses a mix of balanced and single-ended components. I'm not an engineer, but I would guess that not having to deal with the voltage differences expected between balanced and single-ended inputs/outputs helps keep the overall signal from degrading as a result of need to step up/down a voltage for each respective component.

Rushton...yep, I have heard of inconsistencies in balanced interfaces as well. Something almost to the effect that European brands and North American brands reverse the positive and negative pins, so that in many cases mixing balanced gear from Europe and North America can result in phase-inversion. Then I heard of one instance where Jeff Rowland makes input-1 on his balanced preamps match the European "standard", whereas all the other inputs match the NA standard. And then I'm sure there are many examples of manufacturers just implementing whatever they happen to be used to.

But yes, I agree that choosing equipment solely because it is balanced is not the critical path, but certainly it is a legitimate consideration IMHO, particularly if by not going balanced forces you to use adaptors and such...