[maguire]

I am eventually going to buy the new ALO MKIII Balanced amp, so I would have to buy cable terminated with RSA balanced end.
My question is can I get that same balanced cable to go single ended again? with another female RSA plug add-on wich terminates into Single ended?

 

[Steve Eddy]

Yup. Sure can. That the male connector is only available in right angle makes it a bit inelegant, but it works.
 
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[maguire]

Thanks Steve But what about the other way......SE to then balanced adapter cable?
Would this be better ?

 

[Steve Eddy]

Nope. Can't go the other way.
 
Most so-called "balanced" amps use what amounts to two amplifiers per channel that are bridged together. To go from a single-ended plug to a 4 pin plug (whether it's the one used by RSA or a regular XLR), you end up shorting two of the leads together. In bridged amplifiers, that ends up having the output of one amplifier driving the output of another. In essence, the output is shorted. Bad ju-ju for most amps.
 
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[nigeljames]

I made a lead to allow my unbalanced Beyer T1's to be used with the balanced output of my old Audio-gd Roc amp.
It actually worked very well and sounded excellent BUT was advised by Kingwa (Audio-gd head man) and others that it should not be done so I stopped using it.
I suspect with some amps it would have serious consequencies and in other cases (as in mine) it might be risky and asking for trouble.

 

[Steve Eddy]

Yeah. A lot of amps don't like their outputs shorted. If you did that with something like say, a balanced Beta22, it'd be toast.
 
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[maguire]

Thanks for the education. Now I understand. Its Balanced connector to adapter.....

 

[Steve Eddy]

Yup. That's correct.
 
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