Re: Quick Balanced => Unbalanced Conversion

[Laurence Payne]

On Sat, 07 Aug 2004 22:47:43 -0400, Michael Dombrowski
> wrote:

>Having a piece of balanced gear(D/A converter) that I want to connect to
>my preamp/amp but not wanting to pay for a balanced/unbalanced converter
> box lead me to hook up a pair of headphones to the + balanced out and
>ignoring the - balanced out. This seemed to work just fine, any real
>reason to not go this route when I wire up the cable for real? I'm only
>using short cable runs so noise shouldn't be a problem. Only thing that
>comes to mind is that the signal strength might be reduced by half, but
>my preamp/amp should be able to take care of that, no?

The standard way of unbalancing a connection is to use the +, tie the
- to screen. Don't worry about the level.

CubaseFAQ www.laurencepayne.co.uk/CubaseFAQ.htm
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[Arny Krueger]

"Michael Dombrowski" > wrote in message

> Having a piece of balanced gear(D/A converter) that I want to connect
> to my preamp/amp but not wanting to pay for a balanced/unbalanced
> converter box lead me to hook up a pair of headphones to the +
> balanced out and ignoring the - balanced out.

That's how most such conversions are done these days - ignore the inverted
output and go with the non-inverted output. On equipment that is just
impedance balanced, the inverted output is connected to ground through a
resistor - not much signal there!

> This seemed to work
> just fine, any real reason to not go this route when I wire up the
> cable for real? I'm only using short cable runs so noise shouldn't be
> a problem. Only thing that comes to mind is that the signal strength
> might be reduced by half, but my preamp/amp should be able to take
> care of that, no?

The signal strength will be cut in half, but there should be more than
enough from most +4 outputs to make your headphones loud, provided they
don't have too low of an impedance, and load the line-level output down. I
favor the use of high impedance headphones, average sensitivity phones like
the Sennheiser HD 580s in this application.

[Mike Rivers]

In article > writes:

> Having a piece of balanced gear(D/A converter) that I want to connect to
> my preamp/amp but not wanting to pay for a balanced/unbalanced converter
> box lead me to hook up a pair of headphones to the + balanced out and
> ignoring the - balanced out. This seemed to work just fine, any real
> reason to not go this route when I wire up the cable for real?

Not if it works.


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