balanced connection, better than single ended?

The raison d'etre of balanced line is to be able to use any balanced cable cable of any length (or cost) and have that cable have zero sonic artifact. So it does not matter the length (nor price); there is always an advantage to balanced lines.

In order to achieve that, the balanced line standard requires a low output impedance of its sources. This is poorly understood by the (IMO) majority of high end audio manufacturers, who often seem to regard balanced lines as trendy rather than the serious sonic boon that it is. As a result many high end audio products do not handle balanced signals nearly as well as they should, leading to varible results. This is why you see this question come up time and again on these forums!

A common myth is that balanced circuits require twice as much circuitry. This is untrue- quite often they require **less** circuitry as you have less noise, and thus less need for as many gain stages. Also, to build a differential balanced circuit does not require double the parts of its single-ended counterpart!

Yet another myth is that there is no advantage to using a balanced circuit with a single-ended input. As pointed out by Al, you retain the advantages of the circuit, you only loose the advantage of the cable. The gain **does not** change- that is to say you do not loose 6 db, as, at least with differential circuits, the input is looking for the *difference* between the inputs, which might be 2 opposite phases, or it might be the non-inverting input and ground. The differential input does not care.

do you imply that any sonic effect of cable capacitance, inductance and other electrical characteristics effecting the single ended cable sound - vanish? Gone? Diminished?

Yes, either gone entirely or dramatically diminished. IME 'gone' is a lot closer than 'diminished'.

Spectron is right that some differential amps will sound better with a balanced input. But- if the amp is properly designed, really the only difference that will be heard will be that the single ended source, plugged into such an amp, will sound inferior due to the cable artifact.

Roscoeiii, I'm not sure I understand your question... I have used transformers at the output of single-ended preamps to enable them to drive very long cables, which by default have to be balanced. You can't do it with a simple adapter though, you have to use a transformer or active circuit.

Sometimes I run into cases where I want to run a balanced preamp with a single-ended amplifier. It turns out that there is a simple mod that can be performed on most amps with single-ended inputs that will allow them accept the balanced input in the balanced domain- without input transformers. You can even do this with SET amplifiers.

Now I regard the use of transformers or active circuits to convert from one domain to the other as a degradation, so if faced with a preamp that is single-ended out, I would try to find some way to use it with the balanced input amp directly (using a short SE cable) rather than do a conversion, as most balanced amps will accept a single-ended input quite well.