Jadem6, you are correct, in your case. No doubt if you're using expensive (and very good sounding, I might add) cables, you are also paying attention to clean power, keeping interconnects away from power cords, etc. You will not hear any differnce between RCA and balanced -- unless you go past 2 meters, in which case balanced will begin to preform better for a variety of reasons. Also balanced MAY be less subject to power problems as Bluefin has noted. To that, I might add that ther may be a synergy between certain types of cables and components and the balanced/unbalanced question will become part of that complex, black art equation. In your case, RCA sounded jsut the same, so it is! Others, with different preamp/amp combos may find exactly the opposite, so I'm sure this debate will never go away. In my case, RCAs from my SCD-1 to my Placette line stage EASILY outperformed a fully balanced set of NBS cables into a Classe PD-60. But it wasn't the cables, it was the preamp that made the differnce -- the Placette was clearly superior -- the cables made the A/B easy because they just got out of the way -- and it didn't matter whether they were balanced or not. However my runs were short (1 meter) so your mileage may differ. --Lorne
