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

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.

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