XLR waste of time ?

The main issue is that your Moon LP3 does not accept a balanced signal, and does not output a balanced signal to your pre-amp. If your phono stage was fully-balanced, and your tonearm cable was fully-balanced, then it would be advantageous to used balanced interconnects.

If set up balanced, the ground wire becomes the shield of the interconnect and the plus and minus outputs of the cartridge travel inside that shield. The result is that the cable is more impervious to noise and you can run it a longer distance, especially if you have a low output moving coil (due to the low impedance of the LOMC).

Well...while this may be conceptually useful, it's not strictly correct (nor how it's sometimes executed in the marketplace).

Yes, the cartridge is a balanced source. However, the tone arm cable is sometimes not geometrically and electrically "balanced" - specifically, symmetric positive and negative lead surrounded by a shield.

You'd think this would be the "default" cable geometry for tone arm cables - even with single-ended terminations. However, after ordering a "balanced" OL Silver w/ XLR terminations, I found out it is not (and I'm still irritated about this, but not enough to spend the additional money to have my tone arm cable replaced).

Oftentimes, a "singled ended" cable is terminated with an XLR adapter and called "balanced". The problem with this configuration is you do not have a symmetric positive and negative lead surrounded by a shield, but a single hot lead surrounded by a shield. The shield is responsible for carrying the negative signal.

Not only is the asymmetric geometry a problem, but the shield (that is carrying the negative signal) picks up RFI. And since the positive and negative signals are not polluted with noise equally, the balanced circuit design does not "remove" this noise.

Atmashere is succinct spot-on when he says "balanced cable system exists for the **sole purpose** of removing interconnect cable artifacts." True, 'dat!

Atmasphere,

You gloss over many things that are not obvious (or intuitive) to the casual reader. I'm not restating to tell *you* anything you do not already know - just want to make sure everyone following understands the differences (subtle, yet very important). This topic seems to cause a bit of confusion.

A "balanced" cable has nothing to do with the termination (XLR, RCA, bare wire, etc.). As Ralph said, a single "balanced" cable has a specific wire geometry - two identical leads (one positive, one negative) surrounded by a shield (ground). *Usually" a balanced cable is terminated by XLR, but you can't be sure without looking "under the covers". But this is the same with amp / pre-amp design - you can't assume it's a balanced design just because it has XLR inputs / outputs.

While many arms ship with a 5-pin DIN connector (and makes it easy to swap in a truly "balanced" cable), my OL Silver did not. I did not want a DIN connector as I wanted a continuous piece of copper from my cartridge clips to my XLR terminations. Unfortunately, OL does not ship the Silver with a "balanced" cable, even when requesting a "balanced" tonearm (they just slap on XLR terminations on their single-ended wire, then charge you £330.43 plus £21.74 for new XLRs fitting for their Linear Flow 2 cable if you want it truly balanced).

JJ25,

Keep us posted with what you learn. However, you do realize that your experement does not isolate your cable design as the only variable (which means your test will prove nothing). If you don't understand why, either you have not read the above posts, or you do not comprehend the above posts.

There are no absolutes, and I am 100% certain of this fact.

Your response indicates you don't fully understand your test - and that's why your results will be meaningless.

A great audio system is not a collection of optimized independent variables, but a collection of optimized dependent variables. That's what you're missing. The RCA vs. XLR debate is meaningless because the cable "performance" is dependent on the the circuit driving (and being driven by) the signal transmitted by the cable. Single-ended and balanced topologies are very different, and a balanced cable has less effect on a balanced circuit than a single-ended cable on a single-ended circuit. It isn't religion - it's physics and circuit theory (plus, some of us not only have EE degrees, but have spent time in recording studios, and designing audio equipment).

Are you suggesting that your question is novel and no "experement" has ever been tried?

If you have a collection of "optimized" independent variables that perform admirablably, then good for you.