That horse ain't yet dead!

My unconditional recommendation on going balanced in yesterday's post set off alarms. Here's the problem. Balanced is only better in equipment that is designed to take advantage of balanced benefits. Honestly, I thought we'd killed off that old warhorse of "fake balanced" equipment and didn't want to flog it again. I wrongly assumed all high-end audio products are like ours, true balanced. Ever the optimist, I am still going to be hopeful and suggest that most high-end products are true balanced. At a minimum, you need to make sure the receiving product is properly designed to take advantage of balanced's benefit of common mode rejection—a subject I've written many words on in the past. For example, if you're connecting a preamplifier with balanced cables, make sure your preamp has true balanced inputs that offer significant common mode rejection. If you can't verify that with the manufacturer, you're better off single ended. All it should take is a quick call to the manufacturer.