balanced is inherently flawed

Hi all, sorry it took a while to get back to this.

Herman thought I did not present some balanced sources, so I will repeat myself. Nearly all phono cartridges made today are balanced sources: the Shure M-95 from 30 years ago was a balanced source, as is a Titan or a Ruby made today. Ever wonder why mag phono is the only source that requires a grounding wire? Most balanced sources that you try to run single-ended behave this way unless you ground loop the signal with the ground. Or have a grounding wire...

Microphones such as the Neumann U-67 are balanced. So are RCA DX77 ribbon mics. If you wonder why I bring up recording equipment, its because we all listen to this stuff in our recordings: Nearly all LPs and CDs are mastered using balanced connections and equipment.

When you think about it, there really aren't any true single-ended sources. I suppose a tuner might be, but the radio station makes the signal in the balanced domain, so really the tuner is a signal filter of sorts... A CD player might be, but the laser beam is picked up by an optical device, which has an output that is balanced (although its not always used that way). Certain lo-fi devices are single-ended- cheap ceramic microphones for example. No-one in high end audio uses them though :)

I was also chastised about mentioning the phone company. Its not as obtuse as you might think, but you do have to know some history. I'll try to explain it better. Before balanced lines existed, there was no such thing as long distance more then a couple hundred miles as definition was lost very qucikly. You had to yell at the top of your voice to be heard. Balanced lines were developed as a solution, and due to the increase in definition and improved signal transmission, continental and intercontinental phone calls became possible.

The recording industry quickly realized the benefit: lower noise, much lower loss of signal detail, lower distortion and dramatically increased immunity to interconnect cables (does this sound like anythihg audiophiles might be interested in too?). By the early 50's, balanced lines were in place throughout the recording industry and ushered in the age of HiFi and the Golden Age of Stereo.

There was an important point there. These are things that audiophiles find important! Increased definition? Lower noise? Lower distortion? Immunity to cable weaknesses? Yes. We find these things to be important as they bring us closer to the musical experience.

For some reason (mostly cost), balanced line remained the domain of the professional market until the 1980s, when the first balanced gear for the home appeared (FWIW the first balanced tube preamp was made by us in 1989). It took 30 years, but finally balanced line was available for the home with the same benefits to audiophiles that brought them HiFi in the first place.

These days it is hardly more expensive to build balanced stuff as it is to build single-ended. Look at the tube preamps that are out in the marketplace and you see what I mean. Most of them are single-ended. The few that are balanced do not cost any more then the competition. With semiconductors, OpAmps all have balanced inputs. If you are running semiconductors its almost harder to make single-ended. For the record.

The gain thing:
Balanced allows for the same gain with less noise, close to 6 DB less noise, easily achieved. Despite imperfections caused by mismatches, tube issues and the like this remains true. When people say otherwise its because they have not played with these circuits- if they had then they would know!

Another interesting fact about balanced differential circuits is that there is a distortion-cancelling feature. This effect works even if the circuit is not perfectly balanced. Again, if you work with this stuff, you find these things out.

It is possible to operate things like EQ for LPs in the differential domain, and never have to worry about how well balanced your circuit is: the EQ will always be correct.

Volume controls and switches when executed in the balanced domain tend to be more accurate and less noisy then when the same types of switches and volume controls are single-ended. To give you an example, let's say there is a defect causing a volume control to drop out at a certain level. With single-ended, the signal is gone! With balanced, the signal drops only 6 db. In the case where a stereo volume control had poor tracking from channel to channel, with the balanced version the tracking problem would probably not even manifest until things got a lot worse (to the point where the SE version would be unusable rather then inconvenient).

I can offer a ton more of things like this, so again I have to state: Herman is wrong on every point offered. So Herman, contact me off line (or call me) and I'd be happy to fill you in. There are also a number of fabulous texts on the subject if you are interested. This is not about anyone taking a drubbing, I'm happy to help out.

And finally, I appreciate being allowed to try to set the record straight. Again, if you don't believe me, there is a mountain of evidence out there that shows how balanced lines perform better and there is no evidence to the contrary (although there is a lot of hearsay). There is a lot of myth, and in general audiophiles (myself included) tend to let go of these myths slowly if at all. We have to be constantly vigilent about this sort of myth if we are to advance the state of the art.

Thanks for taking the time to more clearly state your case. It was much better than the "it is better because it is better" post you put up earlier.

You seem to miss the big point here.

We are talking about home stereo, nothing else. Not recording studios, not the phone company, nothing but home stereo. I don't care if NASA used balanced circuits to cut down on noise. I'm not going to the moon.

I concede that balanced has advantages in the noise arena, but I'll repeat myself. If my 103 dB speakers are dead quiet with a relatively inexpensive ($1,350) integrated, who cares how much quieter balanced will be?

I concede the point, I just don't see any advantage for my home stereo.

As far as being wrong on every point, you don't seem to understand what it means to be a balanced source. I'll explain. It means you have two signals of equal amplitude but opposite polarity.

There is absolutely no commercial media available today that stores data in a balanced format. The ability to output a balanced signal means that a conversion has to be done somewhere. Even if you use a phono cartridge in a balanced mode, the data on the disc is single ended. Once again, I don't care what they use in a studio, I don't use microphones at my house.

Balanced output from a laser diode? You made that up, right? The sensor reading the reflections from the disc either outputs a high or a low depending on whether or not the laser hits a spot where light is reflected: a high or a low, a one or a zero, a true or a false. The information on the CD is stored in a digital format as data representing a certain amplitude at a certain point in time. The next data point is either, higher, lower, or the same as the data point before it. There is absolutely nothing at all balanced about any of that.

In twenty plus years I have yet to hit a dead spot on a volume control. I'll take my chances.

I see nothing in the information you presented that leads me to believe that balanced will sound better than single ended. Please note I said "sound better," not that everything else being equal it can achieve a lower noise floor.

I know we are beating a dead horse here so I'll let it go.

Good luck selling your inherently flawed balanced stuff :>)
I'll continue to enjoy my inherently flawed single ended.

If all you had said was that you didn't see any advantages for balanced equipment in your own home system, then who but you would be in a better position than you to make such a statement. However, you grossly extrapolated your position and stated that balanced is inherently flawed. While some of your observations may be valid your conclusion is not particularly logical.

Onhwy61, if you only read my last post then I can see where you come to your conclusion, but if you followed from the beginning you will see that one of my main reasons for taking the inherently flawed position has to do with the problem of first taking data that is single ended and creating an inverted copy, and then maintaining equal but opposite signals through the system.

I'll stand by that even though I did get pulled off track a bit with the noise and source issue.

Hi Herman,

Its obvious to me that you're not getting what I am talking about else you would not be responding this way. I'll try it another way, maybe you'll see.

One of the things balanced does for you is it helps get rid of cable problems. That is how come Mercury was able to park their recording truck behind Northrup Hall in Minneapolis in 1958 and then ran their mic cables over 150 feet from the hall to the truck, and got a recording that is still considered state of the art today. If there were the cable problems that audiophiles see routinely today, this would simply not have been possible. Mercury did this in 1958 when no exotic cable industry existed at all. How did they do this? Balanced Line connections.

You can't say that this has no effect on you as an audiophile- Mercury's recordings are legendary. Now, if you could have a cable system in the home that eliminated cable problems, so you could run 30 or 50 feet of cable without any high frequency loss, without any loss of low level detail, for that matter sounded excellent regardless of the cable you used, would you be interested? If you say no, you will not be in agreement with most of the audio community. These are very real benefits of balanced lines, and they have very real benefits for audiophiles who use them in the home.

I used the other industry examples to make a point, which was that these industries benefited from this technology for the same reasons that audiophiles can:

Lower noise
Lower distortion
cable immunity
wider bandwidth

These are very real benefits and are readily audible.

Yes, a light sensor (from a CD pickup) is a balanced device. It has two leads, neither of which has to be tied to ground to work properly. That's how most balanced sources work. How a designer chooses to use the device is a different story, just like a phono cartridge, which is another inherently balanced source. Sure, you can use it SE, most people do, but at the end of the day the cartridge will not care how it terminals are connected, as neither side of the inductor is tied to ground. That's how balanced sources work. If you let both sides of the cartridge float, and just use the tonearm as a shield, along with the shield of the tonearm interconnect, you have a very elegent and simple balanced setup. Nothing to it. Its actually *harder* to run the cartridge SE, as noise, hum and RF interference are harder to get rid of and you have three connections to make instead of two.

I'll revisit the noise thing for a moment. Its possile to build a phono section with less stages of gain then ba single ended phono section, using a differential topology, one that can work directly with low output moving coil and yet be quiet. Now, if you can eliminate a whole stage of gain, you have less distortion, wider bandwidth and greater definition all at once. Audiophiles like that sort of thing. Sounds better. That's a very real benefit, its already in service in the field, and it connot be denied.

It would be nice if this was a case where we could agree to disagree, where this was all opinion. But this is not about opinion, which is why I feel compelled to set the record straight. There's a lot that I don't know, like, for example, anything much about saxopones. Kenny G kinda wrecked that for me. But I have been working with balanced circuitry for the better part of 30 years, and seen repeatedly how much better it performs then single-ended approaches to audio. Not that I'm saying that SE is bad, just that balanced (done right, which is not that hard) is better and *any* audiophile can hear it. I had a girlfriend who was deaf in one ear, and half deaf in the other, and *she* could hear it, so I am confident you can too if it give it a straight shot. You know, just the facts.