Sex and the balanced interconnect.


Caught your eye, didn't it.

I am contemplating a new line level crossover, and it comes with XLR balanced outputs. My power amps have XLR balanced inputs, so I thought...why not give balanced a try. The problem is that both the crossover and the amps have female connectors, so that the interconnect needs to be male on both ends (just like an rca interconnect). I find cables offered with a wide variety of connector configurations, but I can't find any XLR cables configured male-to-male, although I could put in a special order and have them made.

Is it unusual to require male-to-male configuration?
eldartford

Showing 3 responses by kr4

I find this difficult to understand. The gender of XLR connectors is defined by whether they are outputs or inputs. You might check the crossover to see if you are looking at the right ones.
You asked: "I wonder why this is the standard. RCA and phone plug interconnects are all male-to-male."

The answer is that it makes it nearly impossible (without significant effort) to connect an output to an output or an input to an input. With RCAs, anything's possible.
Yup. In fact, putting aside potential advantages in regard to noise pickup, the security of the connections and connectors makes all the fancy RCA permutations seem like toys.

Kal