upstateguy
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2004
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- 182
I didn't describe anything.
All I did was Retweet what a Benchmark engineer posted about using a balanced amp with headphones. This was before the industry giants realized how much money there was to be made by using the volume exploit.
Maybe the real dummies in your scenario are the folks, who despite having all the pertinent information, are never the less duped by a greedy industry out to make money by promoting a topology for headphones that was designed for long cable runs in studios?
In doing all this re-posting I noticed something that might account for the subtle difference that has been reported between Balanced and Single Ended. Elias Guinn said, "Damping factor is the ratio of speaker (load) impedance to amplifier (source) impedance." What we know is that (1) going "Balanced" doubles the source impedance, doubles the distortion and doubles the noise and (2) that increasing the impedance, increasing the distortion and increasing the noise changes the sound. (All of which probably doesn't matter if the levels are inaudible to begin with.) Anyway, it's just a guess.
"To create low-distortion headphone response, one must consider 'damping factor'. A high damping factor will control the response of the speaker, thus preventing the physical impedances from dictating frequency response. Damping factor is the ratio of speaker (load) impedance to amplifier (source) impedance. In other words, the best damping factor will result from a low source impedance."
this is interesting. Lots of balanced amps have such low output impedance that they already have a very high damping factor. I wonder if the changes we hear are damping factor or otherwise. I have A/B'd my single ended and balanced output of the Geek Pulse a few times, and in my best attempts at volume matching, I perceived a difference. I preferred the balanced, however, I believe the Geek only uses the DAC in dual mono when being fed into the balanced out, so maybe there's also another difference there. Also it is good to know that not everyone here believes everything they read on a forum, and can do some deeper research
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