Balanced XLR to RCA Adapters: Good or Bad?

I WOULD take that bet, at least if I could do the comparison in my system. I know from experience that we'd hear the difference easily.

I've used RCA/XLR adaptors. The commercially available ones all sounded like mud. My preamp designer then built me a custom pair from higher quality components and they were much better. However, best of all was when I got suitably terminated interconnects and dumped the adaptors altogether. No small improvement.

The Seller's advice was wise. Have the TT outputs reterminated to single ended and skip the adaptors.

.

Come on Doug, you have more invested in a single cable than he has in his entire system. There is no way he can hear a change with an inch or so of metal between the end of a cable and the input to his old NAD integrated.

Not knocking his system, it just isn't in the same league as yours.

.

I disagree on re-terminating from balanced to single ended. As someone stated above, phono cartridges are inherently balanced. I don't see why you would want to take a real, fully balanced, piece of audio equipment and modify to single ended just for a connection. In the context of this system you are better off getting some of the cheap adapters from a music store. The reason for this is that even though your old NAD is good equipment, it just doesn't have kind of resolution to make the upgrade or expensive xlr adapters worth while. Also, by mentioning the PS Audio, it seems like you might updating your system anyway. If, in fact, you do upgrade, keep a couple of things in mind. Not all equipment and not all cables that have balanced connections are really balanced. With equipment, it is expensive to make a component fully balanced because they have to double up on all the internal parts in the signal path. A lot of companies put xlr connectors and lable the connection balanced, but it is not really balanced. If you are not sure, there should be 2 sets of specs (balanced and non balanced) listed for the piece. If only 1 set of specs, it probably is not balanced. Cables need to be balanced as well, not just have xlr's. The cable should have 3 seperate conductors or, at the very least, 2 conductors and 1 shield. I hope this info can help you with your decision.

True enough, Herman...

For some reason I clicked on YOUR system and was responding with that in mind, which of course isn't relevant to the OP either. Pre-new year's lack of sobriety?

Dear R1g audio, A phono cartridge is an inherently balanced transducer that can potentially drive a phono stage in balanced mode. However, if said phono stage is not also a true balanced device, then there is no way to take advantage of the potential of a cartridge to drive it in balanced mode. No matter how you connect that cartridge to that single-ended preamp, the signal will be processed in SE mode. XLRs on the end of the phono cable and XLRs on the phono input of the phono stage will not do squat to change these facts. Ergo, the OP loses nothing by re-terminating his phono cable with RCAs. Further, while I agree that the OP's system is not likely to be terribly sensitive to the non-purist approach of using XLR to RCA adapters, I would side with Doug; why put a totally unnecessary kludge in the signal path when it can so easily be avoided? (Adapters suck, IMO._

I would guess that the OP could find a tech who can re-terminate his phono cables for about the same cost as that of an XLR to RCA adaptor.