I am using them with a balanced connection and they sound great. The cable has to be right, i bought one from Aliexpress and it was making amp distortions because was wired wrongly at the 3.5mm jack sides. Then I got one from Amazon and that was wired correctly. For reference, the 3.5mm TRS...

I wasn't trying to defend that position, I was just speaking from a normal use position. I don't know how we got discussing into that tangent, because that link is not even related to those headphones and has 4100 posts... :eyes:

WHO suggested that??? Why would you plug in the right side a TRRS jack? You are suggesting that and then argue that's somehow a "hidden fault" of the headphones. Anyone needs to read the manual and... use common sense.

I think that you don't really understand what's going on there. The cans are "balanced", because their four wires are fully separated inside, all the way to the TRRS jack. Only the SE cable (that comes in the original box) joins two of the wires to the common ground. A truly balanced cable, with...

That's not the "Bluemini R2R" dongle (HIMALAYA). That one has R2R marked on it. https://store.hifiman.com/index.php/deva-pro-open-box.html

Direct wired (even a SE connection) sounds slightly better to me. Sadly, the USB connection is limited to 48kHz/16bit. I guess it depends what DAC you have. Computer on-board sound is usually not good.

IMO the first picture is wrong. There is no need for "ground" on a balanced connection, and that jack has an extra (unnecessary) ring. A TRRS is enough, see the below example:

And something very wild:

Basically 16 ohm is a low load for normal (off-the-shelf) headphone chips or op-amps. It disturbs their negative feedback, comes closer to the protection limitation, increases THD at higher volumes, etc. Balanced mode is achieved most of the time by using two of those amps, in bridge mode, each...

It really doesn't matter. Even a shielded cable with one core can carry the balanced signal... not purity balanced indeed, but from one cup to another is really not relevant. Especially at such a low impedance (16 ohm), it won't pick-um any stray EMF. This is the connecting cable between cups...

It does not need ground. It can be either one core + shield or just a simple twisted pair.

Why not? Balanced needs only two wires per side. The left side jack has four "contact places" for those wires - (1) one Tip + (2) two Rings + (1) one Sleeve - TRRS.

You need to select the input device too. The simplest way to do it is to select "What U Hear", but that has limitations (48kHz SR): What I did was to connect the SPDIF output of my sound card with the SPDIF input and "play" the music trough SPDIF at 24bit / 96kHz SR. Selected those in the...

I think I found a way to see how much the channels are "joined" together by the compression... the top scope in XY mode is "wider" when playing a FLAC (from CD) than when I am streaming. Hard to capture the max value, on FLAC it went all the way to +/- 37. Pandora, SiriusXM barely hits +/-12.4...