Transparent Interconnect Question....


I have an Ayre V-3 amp and a Krell Showcase Pre/Pro and have decided to purchase some Transparent Interconnects 1 to 1.5 meters in length. I understand that these 2 units are fully balanced. My question is the following...

Would it be better to run balanced Transparent Ultra MM Technology or for roughly the same price purchase Tranparent Reference MM Technology with an RCA connection?

Also, how about Transparent Reference MM Balanced vs Transparent Reference XL RCA?

Please let me know. Although I appreciate all responses, I am not interested in knowing other cable suggestions at this point. I have heard at least 15 other brands and prefer the Transparent. Thanks
kmiller5
I've used Transparent Ultra Balanced, Ref with XL Balanced and now Ref with MM RCA.

From my experience, the improvement from Ultra to Ref with XL was very obvious. Less so from Ref with XL to Ref with MM.

Although the above did not point to a definite comparison result, but I would imagine a model line upgrade would be better than the change from RCA to Balanced within the same line?

BTW I am using fully balanced gears.
nsgarch, I can't imagion were you came up with your explaination of an input SE stage, it just isn't true.

Most of your other points seem "made-up" too.

As an example, if you take a balanced connection and just connect the pos or neg leg to ground, everything would work fine without the mumbo jumbo you describe. That is basically a SE connection.

steve
oh, the main benefit to balanced connections is that the grounds are isolated between equipment.

steve
rats, the situation you refer to is one where the Bal and SE jacks are internally wired together. A typical example are amplifiers that have both Bal and SE inputs, but to use the SE, you need to install a jumper clip into the XLR jack, usually between ground and the XLR's negative hot pin. This is because the RCA hot is connected internally to the plus hot of the XLR while the RCA neg is connected internally to the neg hot of the XLR. The jumper connects the RCA neg to circuit ground in order to make the SE input work. Only now, you are definitely driving only half of the amp's input circuitry with signal.

So you are right, in that you don't HAVE to have an inverter at the input, but then the relative benefits of using the Bal inputs just increase.
If you equipment benifits from balanced (my Gamut CD1R does) then balanced transparent is the way to go, but to truely take advantage make sure you can also do transparent speaker cable, so if that means a step down, then do it.

I found the latest MM to be vastly better than XL even on the Reference (and I use to own Reference XL Single Ended (not with XL) and the Reference with MM XLR is superior in my system.