Originally Posted by mshan
Hi Peter:
Nice review!
Could you elaborate on the sonic differences between the XLR and RCA outputs of the Benchmark DAC-1?
And do you think these differences would be eliminated by using #1) XLR to RCA adapters, and #2) downstream components which are all unbalanced?
Well what I noticed is that compared to the XLR outputs, the RCA outputs sound more like the headphone output, though not quite to that extent. This is what made it difficult to tell how much better other headphone amps were.
As far as your second concern, the review I did was using XLR to RCA adaptors, and the only components afterward were unbalanced, but this is how I realized how big the difference really is. I don't know if there is a way to make the DAC1 RCAs sound any better than they do. If I were you, I'd just use XLR to RCA adaptors to get the best sound out of the DAC1, unless you have to connect two different components to it, in which case, I guess you could use a splitter as well, and it would still probably sound better than the DAC1's RCAs.