True-balanced vs cheat-balanced XLR headphone cable.
Jul 6, 2011 at 2:05 PM Thread Starter Post #1 of 7
Gwarlek

Gwarlek

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I have shielded starquad cable Canare L-4E6S along with Cardas connectors and 3-pin Neutrik XLRs and want to make cord for HD650. At first I though it won't cause me any problem, but now when it came to the actual thing questions started to appear...
- Connecting just Positive and GND wires to XLR 2,3 terminals doesn't make it true balanced. Am I right? Let's call cheat-balanced.
- To achieve true-balanced connection you have to spring shield in action. While with common XLR interconnect it is piece of cake, headphone xlr cable with it's bifurcations makes the whole thing troublesome: I didn't try yet, but can already figure that splitting braided copper screen in two is near impossible.
 
Possible solutions:
1) Drop the idea of making true balanced cable and just make it simple. Will it loose any SQ potential? What the aftermarket headphone cable manufacturers (DHC, Cardas, SAA etc) do?
2) At cable split point leave a bit of shield and make the rest of it to connectors with copper foil.
3) Make the cord off two separate cables.
 
Thanks for your time.
 
 
 
Jul 6, 2011 at 2:34 PM Post #3 of 7


Quote:
gwarlek said:
- Connecting just Positive and GND wires to XLR 2,3 terminals doesn't make it true balanced. Am I right? Let's call cheat-balanced.
 
Click to expand...


Wrong, this is balanced. 
 
Headphones (and speakers) dont have a "ground" connection. They have "in phase" and "out of phase" connections. The MFR chooses to connect one of  these to ground, thus making the headphones SE. 
 
Different people will do different things with the shields on their cables. Whether you shield your cables or not has no effect on whether the system is balanced or not. There are reasonable arguments for both choices.
 
Jul 6, 2011 at 4:09 PM Post #4 of 7
Quote:
fallenangel said:
As this is a headphone cable, where do you plan to connect the shield (pin 1 of xlr) on the headphone side?
Click to expand...

I was going to connect it to GND (negative?) pin on headphone side.
 
Quote:
nikongod said:
Wrong, this is balanced. 
 
Headphones (and speakers) dont have a "ground" connection. They have "in phase" and "out of phase" connections. The MFR chooses to connect one of  these to ground, thus making the headphones SE. 
 
Different people will do different things with the shields on their cables. Whether you shield your cables or not has no effect on whether the system is balanced or not. There are reasonable arguments for both choices.
Click to expand...

Any place where I can read these arguments?
 
 
Jul 7, 2011 at 12:25 AM Post #7 of 7
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