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”).
Honestly I have always wondered about this. In my case I prefer balanced for various reasons, mostly personal. I like the way balanced cables and interfaces look. I like the feel of a balanced cable and how they connect to the gear. And I love how balanced output sounds. To my ear, I think balanced sounds just a little bit better than SE. Just a little bit. And for me, every little bit means a lot.
So that’s my take. Not very scientific, I know! A lot about this hobby goes beyond the science, though. And that’s OK. We like what we like.
Phenomenally useful and enlightening article and thread. Bookmarked for future reference.
Now here’s my question.
Let’s take this rig for example, but it could be any rig of a similar build.
This DAC/Amp all-in-one is balanced internally, but then the designers opted for single-ended RCA Aux ins + outs in the back for piping in an external DAC or running in DAC mode to an external amp.
My question is, why not be balanced in the back too? Space constraints to keep its footprint small? Cost? Or, they tested a balanced AUX In/Out prototype and couldn’t hear enough of a sonic difference? Something else?
rig.