Oh… it pains to listen his voice…
I bet he just failed with the cables from the start and did not even read the device manuals that clearly shows the fumble he did and then claims its a device issue…?
It’s like those 101 things for… those who need them.
If you have balanced Input (any device) and balanced output (any device) use a balanced cable…
If you have unbalanced input (any device) and unbalanced output (any device) use a unbalanced cable…
It’s not that hard.
Also don’t mix the two cause it’s just dumm and might have issues like this vpooper.
His Rode AI-1 (Audiointerface) has been acting up on the software side, was fine on the EMI front though. Fine in the sense that it had audio ground and USB-ground decoupled making single ended work just fine.
The replacement Scarlett Solo couples USB-Ground to Audioground causing the issues described in the video when running single ended.
His channel is somewhat small, yeah…
I would like to trade place with Dave. He is highly regarded in the electronic industry.
I really do not care how many subscribers or followers the “guy” has if things like this happen. lol
Dont be this guy. lol
His Rode AI-1 (Audiointerface) had something mentioned as ¼” impedance balanced outputs.
"impedance balanced, allows the rejection of external noise by ensuring any electrical interference is induced equally in hot and cold signal legs. This allows the common mode rejection characteristics of a balanced input stage to reject these common mode signals and hence maintain the audio fidelity of the signal."
So when moving / changing to a normal “balanced or unbalanced” connections / gear.
(so the man guy did know this, right?)
He should use a proper cable more suitable for the job. (not the wrong one or not blame the gear)
He’s right about the audio. Playing same time from both outputs but it’s also by design. Blame gear again?
Have connected many Scarlett devices for audio usage with USB and unbalanced connections to speakers. Guess what? Not one single error or disturbances in audio. It’s clean.
101 use right cables with right gear, ones again.
@EthanScully, Welcome to HFGF !
That was a good read - thanks for sharing the article. It dovetails nicely into what one of our regular contributors @WaveTheory posted “Is Balanced Better? Pros & Cons of Balanced vs. Single Ended”
We have a thread dedicated to discussion on that very topic, that you may find interesting.
Discussion topics are where individuals can go to discuss topics of interest civilly. We just ask that participants remain open to other opinions and to not attack those that are different from their own.
Thanks for sharing. I intentionally did not go into the depth of circuit explanation that was done in this article in my post above. I don’t know if that level of detail is necessary to help a lay customer decide if they should buy a balanced stack.
The biggest quibble I have about the headphones.com article is their referring to headphones as balanced. They allude to how whether a headphone is balanced or unbalanced is determined by the internal wiring, but keep using the phrase “balanced headphone”. I think that’s a bit misleading as every headphone driver will work in a balanced circuit, but not every headphone maker wires the drivers in their headphones to be connected to a balanced amp circuit.
The issue of crosstalk in an SE circuit presents a challenge. In truth, though, I don’t think it’s that big of an issue anymore. There are a number of SE designs that have reduced the crosstalk to essentially 0, or at least have lowered it to a level that is comfortably below the threshold of human hearing.
The main argument in favor of balanced amps and dacs, IMO, is external noise rejection, particularly in this age where computers are an increasingly common audio source. USB audio connections to a desktop computer can be very noisy, and the balanced amp/dac circuitry is the best way to remove such noise.
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.
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.
More power than its own SE output. Not more power than an equally-priced well-designed SE-only amp. Not as a general rule.
That’s just marketing. The industry is always trying to sell “the new thing” to everyone regardless of who really needs it or doesn’t. It’s like game developers recommending you the newest graphics card even if you can play their game perfectly fluidly at 1080p/30, just because they’re natural partners with the GPU manufacturers and each side keeps driving up sales of the “great new thing” for the other side.
Of course you went to the opposite end of the spectrum… Ultrawides are becoming way more common, most of them being 3440x1440/60+Hz. And there are plenty of advantages to those panels that have nothing to do with marketing…
The problem with this subject is that you have to untangle the fantastic mess marketing has created, then you have to get everyone to understand DC circuits correctly, then the pitfalls of AC circuits and then after you did all of that, you can just shut the entire conversation down with an “It depends.”
Because, if one wanted to, a headphone amplifier could have two galvanically isolated circuits up to the point where the TRS leaves the front of the device. Then there is no issues with current flowing from the “right” half of the headphone through the “left” since there is no way to complete such a circuit (outside of capacitive coupling in the wires, transformer and PCB, wich can be supressed).
This is another problem. Because the “it has more power”-argument most of the time assumes amplifiers are always voltage limited. To get 10W, you can either have 1V @ 10A or 10V @ 1A.
Ohm’s law is useful, just that in case of a 10V voltage limit, you will not get 10W through a 32 Ohm load (should be 3-ish W).
A 600 ohm headphone has no crosstalk problems unless you’re connecting it with a cable with a common GND wire for both channels and that wire is some ridiculously thin wire with 10s or 100s of ohms impedance. I will bet you you will not be able to hear a difference from amping it “balanced” in a blind or ABX test vs. an equally powered and THD+N spec’d SE amp.
think like wave said the “depends” answers is also applicable here
did you have long cable runs between dac and amp → balanced preferred
is your amp primarly desinded to be used balanced and the singlended is only here for convenience sake like the schiit magnius for example
do you have a headphone that needs a powerplant to drive it proper, than most amps give you more juice on the balanced output
some EMI problems
otherwise for most users there no need to buy balanced options but if the gear you have does have the option to use balanced why not build some cables as a little hobby project and see for your self if you can hear differences between single ended and balanced
I couldn’t agree more! The way balanced is being pushed in the market right now I feel like it’s almost entirely a gimmick - a way to get people with “only” single-ended gear to want to upgrade and buy more gear. (“I only have a Magni, so I need a Magnius!”)
That doesn’t mean balanced is bad in any way. I think amps like the Erish, Magnius, and Jotunheim sound perfectly fine. And I think DACs like the J2, Modius, and LA-QXD1 sound perfectly fine. There’s no reason to avoid them at all. Just don’t “upgrade” thinking they are a silver bullet to sound quality, because they aren’t.
Balanced isn’t inherently better in some way (practical situations like ground loops or long cable runs aside), it’s just a different architecture, and as such may sound different. The designers have different options and different tradeoffs to manipulate the sound. But in general it’s just another architecture (kind of like THX feed forward and Topping nested feedback).
I currently have a Jot2 and LA-QXD1 by my listening chair. But it’s not my best sounding setup. My single-ended only Allo Revolution DAC into the Lake People G111 sounds significantly better. Price isn’t that different between the two setups. But the $$$ went into better components on the single-ended chain, and into doubling the number of components in the balanced chain.
For me, in the end it’s just something different to try. And different is good - otherwise this hobby gets boring.
[edit]
An interesting new product that shines some light on how much marketing buzz is behind balanced is the Schit Lokius. It’s balanced in / balanced out. But to keep cost down it does all of its filtering single-ended. The input signal goes through a balanced to single-ended conversion before the filter stage. Then after the filter stage it is converted again single-ended to balanced. Schiit explicitly says they did this to avoid doubling the cost of the device. It’s really a single-ended device, just with balanced connections. This isn’t bad at all. Just an architectural / cost choice.
It turns out all THX amps (that I’m aware of) with balanced input/output do the same thing. Balanced input, converted to single-ended for the THX magic portion, then converted balanced at the output.
Wow, that sounds like something’s broken, not just “low quality”. You could check if it’s the FiiO’s fault using a male-to-male stereo jack and a multimeter set to DC volts, see if the muted channel has any voltage fluctuations vs. GND when playing music (millivolts, microvolts, however low your multimeter can go). If it’s not the source it would have to be the connectors or cable. Then you could try cleaning both connectors on the FiiO and the cable to make sure it’s not a contact problem, and if that doesn’t fix it you could still improve it a lot by recabling the headphones to 4-wire-but-not-necessarily-balanced (though since you already have the BAL-out on the Q3 you could just go for the full TRRS recable at that point). But if it’s the cable’s fault that you can hear 10% crosstalk when muting one channel, it would mean (Mass)Drop has messed up bad on this delivery.
Yep, likely the cable then. As you can see below the wiring post I linked, someone else also found ruined staging on a Drop-made Blon B20 and fixed it by replacing the cable. Looks like Drop might have a general problem with the quality of their SE cables that’s going unrecognized (you know, unless they’re doing it on purpose to get people to think they “need balanced”).
(not the wrong one or not blame the gear)
