How to get balanced inputs working

Its a shame That I'm having a problem with the mbl balanced , because that's where the audio horizon shines more low level detail ,better tmber in voices ,larger soundstage , overall better musicality ,as the original hook up was with the sugden preamp in xlr and was awesome and the sugden is no mbl so I assume all these nice harmonic textures were from the dac

No the audio horizon dac was working in xlr with another balanced preamp the sugden and worked fine in xlr

If you are saying that with the Sugden preamp everything worked well when the digital input to the DAC was provided on its RCA input connector, while the input select switch on the DAC was set to select its XLR input connector, that makes little sense.

If that is really what was happening, the only explanations I can think of are that either the input select function of the DAC is malfunctioning, or its design is such that there is some amount of "crosstalk" (unwanted coupling) between its two digital inputs. In either case the condition would presumably be very marginal, such that small differences in grounding conditions that may occur depending on which preamp is connected would mean the difference between the DAC working and not working.

That all seems very farfetched, but those are the only explanations that occur to me if the facts you have reported are accurate.

In any event, if you are inputting to the RCA digital input on the DAC, its XLR/RCA input select switch should be set to RCA.

Regards,
-- Al

No I'm saying with the sugden preamp hooked in xlr , dac in xlr everything workks fine , so I know the dac is fine ,if I switch preamps use the mbl on xlr ,I have no audio

03-25-13: Pavpet
No I'm saying with the sugden preamp hooked in xlr , dac in xlr everything workks fine , so I know the dac is fine ,if I switch preamps use the mbl on xlr ,I have no audio

I realize that is what you are saying. You are saying that when you apply a digital input signal to the RCA digital input of the DAC, and set the DAC so that its unconnected XLR digital input is selected, you get audio when the Sugden preamp is connected to the DAC's analog output via XLR, but not when the MBL preamp is connected to the DAC's analog output via XLR.

My comments in response to that are in my preceding post.

Regards,
-- Al