Do balanced cable improve sound quality?

[ChristianM]

I recently bought Hiby R3 Gen 2 and my friend asked me if I'm using 4.4 balanced cable and I said I never tried it and he said then you're disrespecting this dual DAC DAP, you should get balanced cable and use it, it will improve sound quality A LOT.

 

[BX700]

I'm interested in the answers to this. Out of the handful of IEMs I have maybe my favourites have been unbalanced with non-replaceable cables. Haven't tried A/B testing or anything.

 

[Tiax]

Balanced in itself is not better. There is nothing to be gained sonically that could not also be gained with a well designed SE amp.

For interconnects, the pros of balanced is noise immunity. For DAPs and earphones/headphones, it's mostly just marketing. And very rare cases of using a headphone that just wouldn't be loud enough in SE but would be with +6dB or less.

Balanced output may sound audibly different though on a specific device, biggest reasons: higher output impedance, failure to properly volume match, placebo.
The single biggest improvement of balanced headphone amps is psychological. "Balanced" sounds nice, "unbalanced" sounds bad.

 

[dunring]

The balanced connector is more resistant to interference, but doesn't help if you already have a silent noise floor and not having a problem with it.
The other is if your device has more power on the balanced side, it can sometimes let you stay in low or medium gain longer for better performance.
Truly balanced systems is only helpful for speakers, not headphones. It's just the connector that's better.

 

[Mofankri]

I recently bought Hiby R3 Gen 2 and my friend asked me if I'm using 4.4 balanced cable and I said I never tried it and he said then you're disrespecting this dual DAC DAP, you should get balanced cable and use it, it will improve sound quality A LOT.

It based on your amp and cans actually.

As dunring mentioned above, balanced connector is more reistant to interference and other noise. Most of the time, it also delivers more power due to the amp circuit routing. If your cans is on the harder to drive side, it is a good idea to change into balanced termination. By "a lot", I think it's an overexaggeration. But at least, in portable dac amp dap recently, I think using a balanced termination is an excellent idea

 

[lairpost]

Some headphones benefit from the increased voltage of the differential or 'balanced' connection whether or not they need the watts (P=V*A). My planars need both the higher V and A to play with authority even at low volume. Only way to know for your setup is to try it but one is not automatically 'better'.

 

[bagwell359]

Check out the specs. My Ragnarok 2 (and the Rag 1) which I owned before) put out much more out of the XLR than SE headphone outputs:

XLR 24 wpc @ 32 ohms
SE 6 wpc @ 32 ohms

The Rag 1 has a similar difference 15 > 3. The Rag 1 also has much lower output impedance in XLR than SE (that's good) - .1 to 3.3) - the Rag 2 is an even .1 to .1

It's also my experience that SE interconnects - esp unshielded are far more varying in sound in my area in Eastern Central New England - tons of RFI - than XLR.

 

[Whazzzup]

I amp what I amp.

 

[g4ndr1k]

I recently bought Hiby R3 Gen 2 and my friend asked me if I'm using 4.4 balanced cable and I said I never tried it and he said then you're disrespecting this dual DAC DAP, you should get balanced cable and use it, it will improve sound quality A LOT.

If you match the volume level (in dB, not the volume dial), they will sound the same. However, I love balanced connections as they are more resistant to interference and other noise, and they usually provide more power delivery.