Is Balanced Better? Pros & Cons of Balanced vs. Single-Ended

[donjoe0]

@WaveTheory

2. Balanced matters most between amp and DAC or on long signal runs between a source and mixer/preamp
   […]
3. There’s no need to seek out a balanced signal chain unless you have noise issues in your system

Which has nothing to do with “balanced” headphones, where the word is being used with a completely different meaning than the traditional one having to do with speakers, long cable runs and noise.

“Balanced” for headphones is not about long cable runs.
“Balanced” for headphones is not about noise.
“Balanced” for headphones is about inter-channel crosstalk and loss of stereo separation and everything that comes from that like staging and imaging.

I don’t know how many times this has to be repeated to you speaker traditionalists until you get it, and until you learn to separate the two topics appropriately.

Can Someone Explain Balanced to me?

First and second diagram here explain the basics of what “balanced” is about on headphones: https://www.headphones.com/pages/balanced-headphones-guide The primary benefit is lower crosstalk because the common ground connection between the channels is removed. Will you hear the difference? Depends what system you’re coming from - a well-designed single-ended system will already give you lower crosstalk than is possible to hear (below -50/-60 dBr), so there should be nothing extra to hear when “g…

Balanced does matter doesn't it?

Except you will never use a 15-ft cable for headphones, so balanced interconnects and EM noise rejection are beside the point here. “Balanced” on headphones is completely different, it’s about eliminating the common ground and getting better stereo performance. Can Someone Explain Balanced to me? This is why IEMs are the first to benefit from it: they have such low impedance it’s close to the common-ground impedance of single-ended cables, which leads to high L-R crosstalk and a somewhat cons…

@danno

Does a balanced circuitry effect imaging and soundstage over se, or just the noise floor and electronic interferences?

Yes, that is the #1 thing “balanced” affects on headphones, if your drivers have such low impedance vs. the common GND that the voltage divider effect increases crosstalk to audible levels (like in some IEMs or Verum 1 type drivers). That’s the clearest case of what “balanced” headphone drive was invented to fix.