I have a seven meter balanced cable between my preamp and amp. In the past I have used RCA Kimber PBJ (no problem) XLR Kimber Hero.. a home made with Kimber wire XLR, and finally a Kimber KS 1116 pair of XLR. The KS1116 are superior to any others I had. Clearly an improvement. I balked at the cost for several years, but finally bought them. The rest of my system has a mix of RCA and XLR. I cannot say the XLR have any superior sound advantage over the RCA within this Kimber model. Though at this point I am not about to buy a $3000 seven meter RCA KS just to say what I think of it here.
Switched from RCA to XLR Interconnects - WOW
I just received a set of Pangea True Balanced Premier SE XLR interconnects from Audio Advisor and connected them between my phono preamp to my amp.
I really didn't expect to hear any major difference, but man was I wrong. The sound quality is night and day improved over my previous cables (Clear Day Cables RCA cables). The improvement in bass response is amazing, and the soundstage got about 2 feet wider and deeper. Mids and highs are also more clearly defined, and the backgrounds are about as black as I have ever heard. What also surprised me is how much hotter the signal is into the amp. I had to turn the volume down quite a bit to equal levels I usually listed to with the previous cables.
FYI, the preamp is a Parasound JC3+ and the amp is a Lyngdorf TDAI-3400.
I'm really impressed. I had always wanted to try using balanced cables but this is the first amp I have owned that had balanced inputs.
I really didn't expect to hear any major difference, but man was I wrong. The sound quality is night and day improved over my previous cables (Clear Day Cables RCA cables). The improvement in bass response is amazing, and the soundstage got about 2 feet wider and deeper. Mids and highs are also more clearly defined, and the backgrounds are about as black as I have ever heard. What also surprised me is how much hotter the signal is into the amp. I had to turn the volume down quite a bit to equal levels I usually listed to with the previous cables.
FYI, the preamp is a Parasound JC3+ and the amp is a Lyngdorf TDAI-3400.
I'm really impressed. I had always wanted to try using balanced cables but this is the first amp I have owned that had balanced inputs.