Quote:
Originally posted by merc:
When comparing unbalanced vs balanced connections, I much prefer the total background blackness and lack of noise. Without the background grain, detail and resolution is greatly increased to my ears. To gain the "musicaliy" related to even order harmonics, I use tubed sources, and in spite of your claim that balanced connections eliminate this, I can easily hear the difference between a tube stage output on a player and an SS one.
Have you actually measured the amount of noise in your system to determine the nature of your problem? Maybe that "blackness" can be achieved by much less drastic means than balanced ciruits. It's far better to avoid noise in a system by good gain structure, good cable routing, and power line filtering when needed than to use balanced audio circuits as a band-aid.

The tube circuitry you mention actually illistrates my point about simplicity. Tube circuits are vastly simpler than their solid state counterparts, are more linear in their native state and as a result they do not require anywhere near the amount of negative feedback that typical solid state gear does. However even a fully balanced tube circuit will cancel the even order harmonic distortion products, which totally defeats the purpose of using tubes in the first place.

I have an old Audio Research tube power amplifier that is fully balanced, and it sounds much inferior to less expensive but simpler unbalanced tube amps I have.

The single ended triode amplifier that I use to drive my high frequency horns has an extremely simple circuit that uses no global negative feedback - it only has two tubes per channel and a few resistors and capacitors. It sounds wonderful as a result.