[Mike Rivers]

wrote:
Hi Wise men..........
Could you tell me somethin' more about the history of the use of 600
ohm lines in audio technology?????

To give you the right answer would be to ask why the telephone company
decided to make this their standard, as we got a lot of our standards
and practices from telephony. I don't know why they chose 600 ohms
other than that's what was what they made at the time. It's actually a
reasonable compromise between having a high enough voltage to get above
the noise level, being able to supply the required power with
reasonable components, and having a low enough impedance so that high
impedance noise sources would be divided down to a negligable voltage.

Just a reasonable compromise, like just about everything else in audio.