The VT-100 has a switch on the back that is used to bring pin 2 to ground when using a balanced IC. It also seems to put resistance into the circuit, accounting for the 100K ohms for single ended versus 200K for balanced. When I used single ended connections, if I switched from SE to BAL, the sound dropped about 6 dB. I was using a passive setup so this drop was obvious.
Now I have an active preamp, Ref 5SE, and so I bought balanced interconnects (mostly to get to use the 12 dB gain of the preamp instead of the 6 dB in single ended). I tried the SE/BAL switch in SE to hear if there was a sound difference, which there was (attenuated highs), but did I burn out one hot lead in the balanced IC by doing this? When I tried another balanced IC using the switch properly in BAL position, the sound was about 6 dB louder than the original IC. My question is if it is possible to damage a balanced IC by crossing one hot lead to ground.
I tried asking Kalvin Dahl at ARC about this but he said I was wasting his time on a conceptual question.
