Why Balanced Headphone Amps? - Page 6

Quote:

Originally Posted by KingOfTheWild 

I have a family member that is currently on my account at the same time as me (I didn't know that you could do that) and he is posting crap that I would never say. He just said "boy do i hate audiophiles" and I had to edit it to say this. I sure hope he doesn't get me banned.

Strange he picked a thread over a year old to pounce on.

Wouldn't mind some new legit activity here :-)

Quote:

Originally Posted by fmlfml 

So what's the conclusion? Balanced amp is a troll?

That was my original question...

I feel that no benefit was demonstrated for the amps that are usually referred to as balanced but which are really comprised of two separate amps per channel in a push-pull configuration, beyond a possible small benefit of eliminating the shared common, which can also be done with an "unbalanced" amp. True balanced amps, which are differential from input to output, are another story, but these are rare in the industry.

Others of course disagree

Quote:

Originally Posted by paradoxper 

Sounds flip floppy. So does this mean you don't feel bridged amps have benefits, while differential amps do?

Not flip floppy at all and the answer is yes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paradoxper 

Care to share exactly what benefits an differential amp offers from bridged?

Reading through the thread would yield this in extensive detail as a number of people contributed data.

To summarize, differential cancels out noise presented at the inputs if you are using a balanced source. Bridged does a poor job of this because perfect matching of the two amps is impossible and it introduces additional artifacts, again due to the same matching challenge.

When using an unbalanced input then you don't get noise cancelling benefits from differential but you do still get the artifacts issue from the bridged configuration.

The difference in this area is quite small and whether it makes any practical difference could be debated.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paradoxper 

I have.

 

I should have been more specific. I understand bridged doesn't offer any common-mode rejection.

 

I was referring to other benefits.

Common mode rejection is basically it IMO.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paradoxper 

Which is pretty important, kinda. :)

Even that has been debated. Assuming you have a balanced source, people have commented that this is really only significant for long cable runs. I don't pretend to have enough background to comment on that specific claim.

Quote:

Originally Posted by paradoxper 

True. OTOH some find balanced to sound better. Hard to discredit someone's preferences.

Even there it is difficult if not impossible to remove the variables. You would need to have a 'balanced' amp and one that wasn't that were as close as possible to being identical in topology and specifications and this is challenging to say the least. Generally speaking, what people are saying is this 'balanced' amp is better than that conventional one which says nothing about the topology.

I suspect that much of the perceived benefits of 'balanced' is in the connector which eliminates the common ground lead, and not in the actual topology, yet you seldom hear of someone using that configuration with a conventional amp.