Experiences With Costly Balanced XLR Interconnects Above $3,000

I tired some others but the Cardas Clear Beyond XLRs on my system are great. Here's a pair very nicely priced.

Hijiri Million Kiwami XLR cables are also great so I have been told but I have not heard them. You wanted over 3K!

I just don’t get it. The reason behind using XLR connectors is to eliminate noise, hum and whatever other signals coming from alien planets from the audio signal.

"This process is called Common Mode Rejection Ratio or CMRR and it is used to eliminate noise and hum which can be common to a signal. CMRR is most often taken advantage of in XLR balanced cables but it can also be used in single ended RCA cables as well. How does this work? Imagine a two-wire cable going from a turntable to a preamplifier. On one end you have the phono cartridge which is a coil of wire - with a beginning and end wire - each end of the coil is connected to one of the two wires of the cable. The other end on the preamp has a differential stage amplifier and on each of the two inputs we place the other end of the wire. With me? Now we start to play a record. The coil generates a moving voltage which is different at each end of the coil - it’s AC so it’s going + to - and then - to + so the voltage is moving back and forth over the coil - the signal always the opposite on each end of the coil wires. Our differential stage is loving this - it amplifies the differences between each end of the coil as the signal moves back and forth and we hear music. Now imagine a noise source - hum from a nearby transformer, noise from a cell phone or anything radiated in the air. That radiated noise is going to pass right through our two wires and be present on each of the two wires in equal amounts. So each of our two wires has lots of noise on it but the noise on each of the two wires is identical. The noise is common to the two wires. What does our difference amplifier do with this? Nothing! It rejects the noise completely. So you have high noise and signal coming into the differential stage and only signal coming out with the noise gone! It’s a bloody miracle. And there, my good readers, you now understand Common Mode Rejection, how it is rejected while at the same time amplifying only the music. XLR cables do this best because they have the two wires inside them surrounded by a third wire that is called a shield. An RCA cable has only one wire and the shield and they are not equal in construction so the noise isn’t as common as it could be and thus rejected not quite as much."

Can somebody here explain to me why $3,000 XLR connectors supposedly have a better CMRR than say $100 XLR connectors? Thanks in advance.

I would say the only advance I’ve seen to XLRs in 40 years of professional recording is star quad it uses a ground and 2x + and - signals that phase out physically along the cable. Nearly all of the studios and all the production sound I’ve done with XLRs have been Canare star quad.

If you use 10k$ XLR interconnects in your system you will never get more info than the original XLRs which cost about 2$ a foot, and we generally never used more than 100 feet of it. If an XLR changes the signal of the channels on the mixer there is a problem with that cable there has never been a time when an XLR changed the imaging of a recording in the studio we would change the cable (there are probably 3 of them between the mic in the studio and the mixing console in the control room). Most mics are phantom powered usually 48v and if one conductor of the XLR has a problem there is a 48v pop and it blows your head off. I’ve seen frequency problems on 3 conductor XLRs with dynamic mics but never low level (changing imaging). Also after the audio signal gets into a component it goes through lots of changes in both analogue and digital circuits so the external XLR is the least of your problems. It’s the cheep unbalanced internal wiring of the component or audio transformer that makes the difference.

Hey its your money but it reaches a point when physics doesn’t care about your psychobabble about a wider and deeper image created by XLR cables and the money you waste could be better used by buying needy kids meals at the rescue mission. Look up 2nd law of thermodynamics then talk about how XLRs create information that doesn’t exist on the original recording.

ryder

Can you talk about the presentation/sound of the WW and Acrolink XLR?

Jafant, WW Silver Eclipse 8 XLR sounds leaner with better separation and tighter bass, Acrolink sounds fuller and warmer in the midrange with more bass. The last comparison was made when the WW was in the process of breaking with the old mains power cable. The results may be different now as the new mains power cable (Furutech DPS4.1 with FI-50 NCF (R)) has replaced the TCS31/FI-28(R). The difference is not subtle. 

Thanks for the responses guys. I’m trying to find justification to spending the money for the ultimate XLR, perhaps my last cable upgrade before I call it a day. @audioman58 made a valid point and I surely agree. It is diminishing returns with most of these costly high-end cables as one will need to spend a huge sum of money for a supposedly small difference. I have to admit I may have overspent on the cabling in my system but I do appreciate quality cables, usually the costlier ones. It’s the small differences that make a (big) difference. It’s the same with components.