Baldr
Sponsor: Schiit Audio
- Joined
- May 14, 2011
- Posts
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I've always understoond carts to be inherently balanced. Each winding is floating with respect to ground, and this is continued through the arm wiring until you reach the sockets for the interconnect. Some cartridges do have a ground strap from the body to one of the pins on the back of the cartridge, but this can easily be removed. The main issue is having to replace the phono sockets with XLRs.
All true, or mostly true in a universe where (i.e. DIY) the following conditions prevail:
All shielding grounds, cartridge body shielding grounds, and turntable system grounds are isolated from or disconnected from right and left cart output grounds. Disconnecting too many grounds can make phono systems hum.
No common ground wiring exists between channels, such as Deccas, some Grados, and many other variable relectance types.
Since cartridge windings are not intended to be hooked up balanced, there is no true center tap where the impedance is quartered. Therefore, a less optimal phantom ground would have to be derived with resistors.
Such an application could be properly implemented with a transformer, but as far as I know, none exist. The difficulty would be to make such a device universal.
It is possible to half-ass/float it with cables; I am just not about half-ass.
Until cartridges have balanced, center-tapped, output coils, count me balancing at the first circuit stage where I can tolerate 6db more noise.
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