Building balanced interconnects--ideas

Thanks, Atmasphere--I am thinking of a carbon-infused nylon braid on each teflon tube, not a metal foil. All are then braided loosely for strength and appearance. I have used Flexo Conductive on power cables, and they are very quiet. How good is Kimber's bulk wire vs Cardas? Neither ever mention Ohno Continuous Cast, but claim to be hyper-pure and soft-annealed, etc. I have to have OOC certified wire by prior experience.

Jafreeman, the issue here is that if you put signal (ground) current through the shield, you can wind up with undesirable effects. In a balanced cable, the signal should only appear between pin2 (non-inverted) and pin3 (inverted) of the XLR. IOW ground should be ignored.

Quite often in high end audio the tenants of the paragraph above get ignored. The result is really expensive cables, or a lot of work put into the cables for no real benefit. If you run separate shields, you will loose a lot of the Common Mode Refection Ratio afforded at the input to the amplifier! IOW use a common shield- it will work better- noise gets into the cable, you **want** it to affect the inverted and non-inverted phases equally! If this does not happen the cable could well have more noise.

Atmasphere--just to clarify, are you saying I should leave the ground pins unused--empty? I understand that pins 2 and 3 carry out what is intended by design in the Wadia 861SE and the ARC Reference 210s I am using. Both of these makers encourage the use of XLR to achieve best sound from their offerings. I now want to use the Duelund 2.0 silver ribbons with silk-impregnated dielectric, which I will individually sheath with FlexoConductive carbon-infused nylon braid--no metal shielding, no dead-end shield, just the 3 individually sheathed conductors in a loose twist/braid over 3 feet. But--bottom line question--are you saying I should leave the ground pins empty and use only the pins 2 & 3 conductors? My system is otherwise well-isolated and free of ground loops via Richard Gray's 240v/120v substation transformer and 1200S for front end. Thanks for your expert advice.

No. Use pin 1 for the shields of the cables.

What type of shield material do your suggest? I want to avoid metal of any type, which would mean nothing soldered to pin 1. I hear you saying not to run a dedicated ground wire between pin 1, but to solder a shield to pin 1. If I don't want any metal at all, what should I do with pin 1 for continuity between the CD player and amps? Forgive my ignorance on this.