Transsexual, Androgynous and Hybrid interconnects

I think Grant (Tvad) makes a great point.

However, as an AtmaSphere owner (and, it is a small club, which I why I agree with Grant), having a cable like you mentioned is VERY attractive to me. The Atmas are simply quieter when you run into their balanced input. Yet, as I have always went into them from a single ended component, be it preamp, CDP, or tuner, I have run this kind of cable successfully.

There are probably other people out there with a similar situation to me, but again, I think Grant's opinion is most wise.

This is not for a subwoofer. I purchased a set of Infinity IRS Beta speakers and they come with a servo control/crossover that has all RCA connections and my amps only have XLR connections.

I understand about the re-sale value problem....I'll deal with that later. But from an audible standpoint, would a custom cable be better than using an adapter?

Any time you reduce the number of connection points, the better off you are. [I work in telecom and it always amazed me how many splices exist between the telephone and the CO/end point. Yes, it works, to ~3kHz or so.]

That said, the Betas ARE an end point, at least for awhile, and if/when you choose to sell, perhaps you could bundle the cables as part of the deal, provided the buyer had a similar setup. I always rail against RCAs, and wish they could and would go away. At least the technology is not stale thanks to the likes of WBT and Eichmann, among others.

There's a recent thread about this topic, and one chap found little difference from the Cardas and the generic ones he found from Markertek. No idea what was in his rig, your results may vary.

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?fcabl&1144257714&openfrom&1&4#1

I spoke to Nelson Pass at Pass Labs. Sweetheart of a guy and gave me several solutions. The best one and most expensive one was to use Jensen Isomax Stereo "Pro" to "Consumer" Converter / Isolator at $210 per stereo pair. I will need two pair. There were couple other ways to go that were less expensive, but I'm in waay too deep now to possibly start to compromise everything I've done so far.

The model number is PC-2XR.

Please see the link below for the web page.

http://www.jensentransformers.com/pc2xr.html

....thanks to all of you for your responses.

Bisexuals are so damn greedy! Sausage or pie. Make a choice!

Given that the crossover accepts RCA only, your best choice is XLR-to-RCA cable. This is the purist approach, which does not add any "processing" to the audio signal, be it an active converter or a passive transformer.
Be sure to terminate the unused phase of the XLR in the recommended impedance and not in a short, like most adapters do!