Beginner008
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
- Posts
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- 42
Are you going to ignore one of the signal or are you able to source a 3.5mm connector with a built in transformer?
If you are going to ignore one of the signal then that is a waste of money!
(Balanced connection contain 3 conductors on each channel. 2 signal paths and one ground. Each signal is inverted to the other so any noise would be canceled out at the receiving end. You can make it work with only one signal and the ground connected but all benefit of a balanced connection will be losted!)
You are mistaken here and no transformer is needed either. Transformer is needed on the signal side of things or op-amps to create a balanced signal for left & right channels.
On a headphone cable side, you only need a separate signal & ground on left and right channel (so a total of 4 separate wires are needed). You probably have not re-cabled your headphones cable before, but only pin 2 and 3 are active on the left & right side of conventional 3-pin XLR jack. Shielding is not connected. For 4-pin XLR jack, all pins are active as follows:
Pin 1: Left Signal
Pin 2: Left Ground
Pin 3: Right Signal
Pin 4: Right Ground
Same thing is done on a dual TRS mini-jacks of the Z7 & PHA-3 .
In that case, it's not balanced, You still use the ground and one out of the two active signal path. This is single end by all mean. I am talking about the actual balanced signal path. If you just want to use a balanced connector for single end single, that up to you, but there is no benefit what so even by doing so!
Balanced connection:
Left Channel:
Wire 1 - Normal signal
Wire 2 - Inverted signal
Wire 3 - Ground
Right Channel:
Wire 1 - Normal signal
Wire 2 - Inverted signal
Wire 3 - Ground
There are only two connection on each side of the Z7, you can used wire 1 + wire 3 or wire 2 + wire 3 (Inverted sound, but still work), you cannot use wire 1 + wire 2 as it cancel out each other.