Do you need balanced conversion?

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:02]Hi, I'm Eric. Welcome back to Not an Audio Review channel where I don't review audio gear. And today we're talking about things that convert signals from single-ended to balanced or from balanced to single-ended. And if you don't know what balanced and single-ended signals are, or the difference between a balanced signal and a differential signal, I'm not going to explain that here because I explained that in my last video, and you should watch that one if you want to know about that. There should be a link in the I don't know this with some there should be a link somewhere. But as I explained in that video, sometimes you'll have a balanced device that for whatever reason different op amps or something like that has a balanced output or input that sounds better than its single-ended output or input. And maybe that bothers you because you're some kind of freak for sound quality. And you know this is a no judgment zone here. We all have the same kink.

[00:00:57]Oh yeah. Oh. Uh maybe maybe we all don't have the same kink. Um pretend you didn't see that. And speaking of kinks, you might have a kink for our sponsor, my Patreon, at patreon.com/notreview channel where you can get early adree episodes, exclusive content, and more for only a dollar. And don't forget to like and subscribe. Anyway, to start with, let's say you have a balanced deck or phono preamp or something and you want to connect it to your nice single-ended tube preamp or headphone amp or whatever from the balanced outputs. Or maybe you have a device like the Orchard Audio Star Crimson 25 monos that I did a video about a little bit ago that only have balanced inputs. The simplest way to do this is just to get a pair of these.

[00:01:46]These are cables that have XLR on one end and RCA on the other. Now, you might ask, where does the extra pin go?

[00:01:55]Because obviously the XLR has three pins, which in a balanced differential setup have the non-inverted signal, the inverted signal, and the ground wire, while the RCA side only has the center pin and the ground return, which is actually this part here on the outside.

[00:02:13]And the answer is, at least on this cable, as I bought it, and most cables like this, that extra pin isn't going anywhere. It's completely disconnected or left floating in engineer jargon. And as I indicated briefly in the last video, depending on your device, this can work fine. I used it, for example, on my SMSL VMD D2R deck into my tube headphone amp preamp. No problem. It's not balanced anymore, obviously, nor is it differential. So, you're having the power you get out of your balance connection and you're not getting the noise cancelling properties because the ground isn't the thing that's impedance matched in these setups.

[00:02:52]The problem is that this doesn't work with all devices. And I'm going to crib here a bit from the guide written by Atomic Bob on the Super Best Audio Friends forum because it's excellent and I'll link to that article in the description so you can check it out and learn more. Now, one problem with this setup is there might simply be noise on the balance output that wasn't accounted for by the designers because the balance design eliminated it. And this might get worse when that ground line is connected to whatever the single-ended devices ground line is doing. Like it wasn't designed with the expectation of being used like this. Still, this is easy to test by plugging in the cable and having a listen. A bigger problem is if you want to connect this cable to a transformer coupled device like my PS audio direct stream deck. If the inverted pin is not connected to anything in that case, you'll get no sound because the non-inverted and inverted wires are connected to either side of the secondary transformer winding. And so cutting one of them eliminates the signal path entirely.

[00:03:53]It's like cutting a string on my still brilliant toilet paper roll model.

[00:04:00]In this situation though, what you can do is connect the inverted line to ground instead. And now the transformer coupled output will work just fine, unlike the floating pin solution. And unlike the floating pin solution, you actually get the extra power benefits of the differential connection because the non-inverted and inverted signals are still going ham on the transformer windings. This isn't balanced, though, because the ground line still doesn't have the same impedance as the non-inverted line. So, you're not getting that sweet noise cancelling.

[00:04:30]However, the problem with this solution is that if you've plugged that cable into something that isn't transformer coupled, well, now you're shorting the inverted amplification stage straight to ground. And as I talked about in my video on op amps, not all gain stages are built to handle that. And your gain stage might melt and now your gain stage is an X gain stage. This is an X gain stage. Actually, I should talk for a second about headphone adapters because the situation there is a little different. So, if you have a headphone with a balance connector like this one, you see it's got four pins as I talked about in the last episode, and you can safely adapt that to a single-ended output with an adapter like this one, and it's no problem. The single-ended jack just has three connectors, the right signal, the left signal, and the ground, and and a shared ground path.

[00:05:26]So, you just split that shared ground path to two of the pins on the balance connector, and it'll work fine as a normal single-ended connection because you've got a signal and ground going to each headphone driver. No mus, no fuss.

[00:05:38]However, you can't really do that in the other direction, at least with a connector like this. Because if you plugged a four pin connector into a balanced headphone jack and then join the two inverted lines together to make a common ground on the single-ended plug, which only has three connections.

[00:05:54]Now you're taking two different amplified inverted signals and running them straight into each other, which well that can damage something. Don't do that. Now the exception here is actually those three pin connectors I talked about last episode on the mass coobo amps and some others which have a separate non-inverted, inverted, and ground. And then you can get an adapter that would just leave the inverted signal unconnected and send the non-inverted signals and the ground onto the headphone. And you can also do this with pentagon adapters if you have one.

[00:06:25]You pretend this is a pentagon to single-ended adapter because pentagon adapters also have separate ground and inverted connection points. So you can actually adapt a balanced pentagon output to a single-ended one with no issue. And DDhi and others sell adapters like this. Anyway, back to interconnects between active devices. There is a sure way to convert balanced to single-ended that will always give you the full power that will actually cancel out noise, at least for the portion of the signal that's actually balanced and will always work and not break your stuff. And that's to use a converter. The most common type of converter you'll find, at least to convert balanced to single-ended, is a couple transformers in a box. Uh, this is one I made. So here you can see we've got female balanced inputs that go into the transformer and then come out as single-ended outputs. And these are cinemag one:1 transformers, which means they're not actually transforming anything and should probably be called not transformers, but no one takes my completely brilliant and totally without complication suggestions. What that means is this transformer has the exact same number of windings on both sides.

[00:07:35]So the voltage and current you stick into it is exactly the same as the voltage and current you get out of it.

[00:07:41]So why would you need such a thing?

[00:07:44]Actually, let's get my amazing model back out again.

[00:07:52]So imagine this string is one winding of the transformer and I'm going to put uh another string right over here. This is an amazingly scientifically accurate model. Now, I can hook up my non-inverted signal to one side of the string and my inverted signal to the other side of the string like I talked about last time, and I'm going to get the combined power and noise cancelling benefits. But then this other string is only going to have a voltage pulling it from one side with the because the other side is going to go straight to ground with no impedance. So, what is that?

[00:08:24]It's an unbalanced undifferential signal. It doesn't have this extra knot for the monkey puppet to grab onto. And if you're confused about that, um, don't blame me. you didn't watch the last video. And anyway, you can see how this would complete the balanced differential connection, giving you full power and noise cancelling up to the transformer and then send the signal on as an unbalanced undifferential connection.

[00:08:46]Sounds good, right? Well, there is one fly in the ointment. As I talked about in my video on the PS Audio Direct stream deck, one of the things transformers do is create harmonic distortion.

[00:09:00]As I also talked about in that video, that's not necessarily bad. I think it's one of the reasons the Direct Stream sounds so good. And lots of tube amps get some amount of their distinctive sound, not actually from the tubes, but from their output transformers. So, here's the output of my SMSL VMD D2R deck measured for harmonic distortion and noise with my audio interface and REW.

[00:09:23]And now, here's the same measurement, but using the converter. You can see the harmonic distortion is obviously higher with a small rise in second order harmonic distortion in the treble and these huge waves of harmonic distortion in the bass.

[00:09:38]Now, if we compare this to the output of the direct stream deck without any converter, you can see there's a similar rise in harmonic distortion, and that's because of the DAC's output transformers.

[00:09:48]In theory, this isn't necessarily a problem. I love the sound of the direct stream deck and that extra distortion in the bass makes the bass sound fatter, which is pleasing to me. The problem is that when I hook up the converter to the direct stream or the D2R, which doesn't have that transformer distortion, it feels like there's a just a bit of fuzz to me. Like it sounds like some of the transformer coupled tube amps that have a little bit of extra surface roughness to me that I don't prefer, but could be interpreted as detail. Now, this actually got better when I resoldered the parts with more flux and made the connections better and also properly braided the cables instead of just letting them hang out. And I think that all decreased the noise or whatever. And at first I was like, that's it. I fixed it. But as I listened more, I realized now it was still there. And if you look at the measurements, my suspicion is that this is because you can see that while on the direct stream deck, the second order harmonic distortion is dominant basically throughout the frequency response, on the transformer barks, starting at around 700 hertz or so, third order harmonic distortion becomes wildly dominant. And these cinemag transformers are not cheap.

[00:10:59]These cost me $125 per transformer, plus shipping and tax and whatnot. And a lot of people love these transformers, which is why I bought them. So, as with a lot of this stuff, this may be a me thing that I'm just sensitive to or don't prefer this sort of sound while other people do. Some others have said Lundal transformers sound better, which are actually less expensive. And lots of others use Jensen transformers, which cost about the same as these, and are also used in Pro Gear, like mic preamps and stuff. So, they're probably pretty good. I don't know. I could try swapping in some different transformers here and see what happens. Different transformers absolutely do have different distortion profiles, so I might find something that not only doesn't make things sound worse, but makes things sound better.

[00:11:45]I'm just not sure I want to throw more money at this particular solution.

[00:11:49]By the way, if you don't want to build your own one of these, there's a number of commercial pre-built options. The most affordable is probably just to get this line level isolator, which essentially is the same thing but with a balanced output. But then you can get the XLR to RCA cable that shorts the inverted pin to ground like this one and you're done. Editor Eric here. One thing I should note is that a line level isolator like this is also a good way to get rid of noise, especially ground loop noise, which I probably should have talked about more in the last video, but basically it's an issue where differing voltages on the ground line of one device can come back up the ground line of another device causing hum and noise.

[00:12:29]There's a number of ways to deal with ground loops, including balanced signals and even just putting the two devices on the same wall outlet can help. But another solution is transformers in a box like these, which isolate the ground lines on the windings on either side and therefore get rid of ground loops.

[00:12:46]However, while plugging that cable into the converter box is fine and dandy, just be careful. Do not plug that cable into a device that isn't transformer coupled if you're not absolutely sure it can handle a complete short or your device might go kabooy. And there's also much higherend converter boxes you can find which can cost a pretty penny but might use custom transformers and have nicer connectors, wiring, build quality, whatnot. I haven't tried any of those though. And because this device has male XLR ports, and because XLR cables are unidirectional, these can only convert from balanced to single-ended. However, you can get or make a device like this with female ports and convert the singleended to balanced the same way.

[00:13:27]you wouldn't get any extra power benefits, but you would get the impedance balance output and noise cancelling from the converter to whatever you're plugging it into. But of course, you'd have the same issue of induced harmonic distortion, which wouldn't get canceled out because it's essentially part of the signal now, not something that's induced separately on both sides of the winding. Now, if you want to do this conversion without inducing harmonic distortion and probably for a lot less money, the way to do that is actively, well, possibly for a lot less money, which is to say, you have a little buffer stage with an op amp or transistors or even tubes if you're an absolute maniac. And that takes the single-ended line and makes a new inverted version of it and passes it on.

[00:14:11]And now you have double the power to boot. Or if you're converting the other way, it would combine the non-inverted and inverted inputs into a new output.

[00:14:19]And this is actually why op amps make this so easy because they already have non-inverted and inverted inputs. So you just stick your two lines there. The inverted signal gets inverted again and added to the non-inverted signal. And now you have a clean full power single-ended output.

[00:14:35]This is the Orchard Audio single-ended tobalance converter that was lent to me by a friend. Thanks again, Kelly. This retails for $300 and is made to be used with amps like the Orchard Audio Star Crimsons I did a video about, which only have balanced inputs, but can be used anywhere you want to convert a single-ended signal to a balanced one.

[00:14:55]Unlike the transformer converter box I made, this has only female XLR connections, so it can only be used to convert single-ended to balanced and not the other way around.

[00:15:06]Actually, when I first got the Star Crimson Loners in, I wanted something to do the conversion, and I ordered something called an Art Cleanbox Pro, which costs $80. Now, this has a lot of good features like more types of jacks, output level knobs, and most importantly, it can be used in either direction. You can convert from balanced to single-ended or from single-ended to balanced. It's got both sets of ports.

[00:15:29]Neat. It is one fatal flaw, though. At least on my system, it sounded like horse pucky.

[00:15:40]Like it just made everything sound kind of rough and dirty and lowfi and blleh.

[00:15:45]No. So I returned that real quick. The arched audio device doesn't have quite as nice build quality or the extra features of the clean box, but it doesn't sound like dookie, so you know that's better. This one seemed to have lost one of its feet, so it's a little wobbly. Uh, I'm not sure if it arrived that way or it's my fault. Sorry, Kelly, if I did that, but yeah, this does look like it's 3D printed plastic, which isn't the most premium. And there's a little chip here. Um, I I think it came that way, too, but if I didn't, sorry, Kelly. Anyway, these are made in the US rather than in China, so you know, it's fine. And I know some people fiend about chassis and things, but what I really care about is the performance, not the box. Also, it doesn't have a power LED, so you don't know if it's on or not. So, you just have to assume it's if it's plugged in, it's on. A little more disappointing, I think, is that it comes with a pretty generic looking 9V switch mode power supply, which I mean, if they're doing sufficient filtering inside the device, it should be fine.

[00:16:46]But I I swapped that out for an III Elite 9V power supply that I already have. And I did feel like I noticed an improvement in the sound when I did that. And that's a nice thing about having an external power supply. It's easy to change. To their credit, Orchard Audio actually provides a schematic so that you know what's going on in there.

[00:17:06]And you can see you've got the signal going into a couple op amps to double the power. And then it goes into a fully differential op amp which splits the signal into non-inverted and inverted lines. And those are good opamps. These are TI OPA 1612 and OPA 1632 op amps.

[00:17:24]And the TI OPA 1612 was recommended to me by someone in my comics as specifically better than the OPA 2132 I talked about liking in my op amp videos.

[00:17:35]And in general, TI op amps are excellent. And you can see from the measurements, there's simply none of the harmonic distortion or anything like that I get with the DIY transformer-based converter.

[00:17:45]Plus, I get a lot more gain than I would with a passive converter because it's actually making an inverted version of the signal. The thing is, if you have a device with both single-ended and balanced inputs, and it's in balanced internally from end to end, and then if you put a single-ended input into that device, it probably has something just like this in there converting the single-ended signal to balanced. Anyway, like if you look at my Parasound A23 Plus power amplifier, it doesn't tell you it has two different power outputs depending on whether you use the single-ended or balanced inputs. It's not leaving half the power on the table just so it can put the single-ended input through unmolested.

[00:18:26]No, it's converting it to balanced and running it through both differential amplification stages so that it always has full power on tap. Which means this converter is mainly useful if either you have a device that only has balance inputs like the Orchard Audio Star Crimson 25s, which is why Orchard Audio sells this in the first place, or the single-ended to balance conversion here is better than what's in your device to begin with, which is certainly possible.

[00:18:53]Some devices like the FSY V3 monolocks I did an earlier video about don't do this stuff well at all. And this is the thing, like Uncle Paul from PS Audio complains about these active devices because they're adding another gain device to your chain of whatever quality, but like if you're using the single-ended inputs on a balanced amplifier, you're already adding another gain device compared to the balanced input. It's just a question of which one. Now, the Orchard Audio Converter has a reputation for being completely transparent. And the guy who loaned it to me said he noticed no difference or if there was one, it was negligible. And if you look at those frequency response measurements, there's basically no difference. But in my opinion, there is a difference in the sound. And it's interesting. In the mid-range, to me, it sounds cleaner and smoother and a bit colder. But in the treble, it sounds a little rougher. Like a tiny bit of lack of refinement at the top, just by comparison to using the single-ended input on the same amp, which also sounds a bit warmer and fuller in the mids. I don't know. And maybe this is my weird treble sensitivity at work. I've compared it before to how for some people cilantro tastes like soap and for others it tastes fine. And of course the sonic differences are probably not just the converter. They're also the lack of whatever converter is inside the A23 Plus and the cooler, cleaner mid-range makes me think there might actually be less distortion overall. Though it's impossible to know without measuring the amp output, which I don't have the equipment to do yet.

[00:20:23]One day I'm going to take these giant resistors and finally build the dummy load I've been meaning to make for a while. This would let me measure speaker amp output safely. And of course the cables might also be part of the difference, but that's controversial.

[00:20:36]And I I did a whole video on that kind of thing. Anyway, the converter doesn't sound bad. Like if I'd never heard the system without the converter, I think it sounds fantastic. But for my tastes, I think I prefer the single-ended input on the Parasound A23 Plus with its warmer, fuller mids and smoother treble.

[00:20:54]I actually wish I had more balanced amps to try with this thing. And I wish I had the Star Crimsons for longer so I could have done more experimentation. I don't think I'm going to do the one week loners anymore. If I'm going to borrow something, it's got to be for longer than that. Anyway, as I was working on this episode and playing with my direct stream deck and the transformer converter, and I was thinking about how it's such a shame that I don't like the way the converter sounds because one of the problems with the direct stream deck is that it has such low voltage output.

[00:21:23]Get out of here.

[00:21:27]Like there's two gain settings on the deck and on the high gain, the balanced output is 2.8 volts and the unbalanced is 1.4 volt. This is already low compared to most decks on the market.

[00:21:38]Like for comparison, my SMSLVMD2R does 4 volts balanced and 2 volts unbalanced. But the real stickler is the low gain on the Direct Stream Deck, which is a tenth of the high gain. 280 molts balanced and 140 molts unbalanced.

[00:21:54]And the problem is that the low gain sounds better than the high gain. But unbalanced, I'm just not getting enough voltage out of the deck to get the kind of volume I want on my amps. you have to really crank the volume knob to get anywhere, but the balanced output is usable. So, I wish I could convert the balanced output to single-ended without a converter box that might mess with the sound. And then I could actually use the better sounding low gain setting. And on top of this, I think the balanced output from the deck sounds better, too. But then I realized something I was overlooking. So, if we look back at the Atomic Bob page about transformer converters, we recall that if you connected the inverted pin to ground, this could potentially damage a non-transformer coupled output if it can't handle a sustained short. However, this works perfectly for transformer coupled outputs like my direct stream.

[00:22:47]So, it occurred to me that if if I just took these cables that I it occurred to me if I just took these cables that I already have and shorted the inverted and ground pins, then I'd be able to use that balanced output on my deck. And on top of this, unlike using a non-shorted cable with a non-transformer coupled output where you're basically just ignoring the inverted output with its extra power, here the inverted signal from the balance source actually becomes part of the ground connection which if we remember in my incredible model will give you the full differential power.

[00:23:21]That's right, a full differential connection through RCA output. However, while this is differential, as I mentioned, this is not balanced. Now, I could just order new cables that have the inverted and ground pin connected, but that takes time and money and isn't nearly insane enough. So, instead, I took the cables I already have and opened them up and soldered a wire in between the two tabs on each one.

[00:23:45]Actually, I first soldered the inverted and non-inverted tabs together because I'm stupid and didn't check with a multimeter first. I just plugged it into my DACK and was puzzled because there was no sound coming out. But, of course, there was no sound. The inverted and non-inverted signals were completely canceling each other out. Hilarious.

[00:24:02]Fortunately, this doesn't seem to have damaged anything. And I figured out what happened and redid the soldering. And then this worked. It worked perfectly.

[00:24:11]The result was much cleaner and clearer than when I got out of the transformer box. No more transformer fuzz. And I got all the power and the improved sound from the balance output. Amazing. You know, this is actually one of my favorite things about DIY. You can make things that are just suited for your use case and potentially save a lot of money. Like all that stuff I said in the last episode about my annoyance that above certain price points, everything's balanced and you're paying for things you might not be using. Well, with DIY, you can just make what you actually want with the features you actually want, provided you have the skill and or there's kits, parts, and designs you need or whatever. Of course, the problem with DIY is this is a giant hole of time and effort. But if that kind of thing sounds like fun to you, that's not actually a problem.

[00:24:54]And I also like stuff like this or how I talked about discovering that if I just turned the gain up on the A23 Plus, it improved the sound. Like pre-improvements are the best improvements. Of course, I still have the issue that I'm outputting a single-ended preamp into a balanced amp.

[00:25:10]If only there was a single-ended power amp I was currently working on that might solve this problem one day. And that's it. Don't forget to like and subscribe and bell hype and whatever. I don't know. Support me on Patreon at patreon.com/notreview channel where you can get early adree episodes, exclusive content, and more for only a dollar. Thanks to my patrons who always sound the best. Thank you.

[00:25:39]Kind of broad at the shoulder and narrow at the hip. And everybody knew you didn't give no lip to Big John.