Can't believe my post generated all of this. Fascinating, but I admit I don't understand half of what you guys are talking about... but that's on me. ;-) FWIW, Parasound told me that when I had both the XLR and RCA outs connected, I was actually shorting out one leg of the XLR. So, don't do that. Also, the Bal/Unbal switch is not an input selector (contrary to my
I am not sure if I can agree to that. I can't think of a review I read that showed lower S/N in the balanced mode but I know just about every review I read showed the single ended mode had lower S/N. Try reading up on the Sound and Vision, Stereophile, Home Cinema Choice, AVtech etc. and you will see that I am stating facts. I understand fully balanced lines reject common mode noise and I am not quite clear why most if not all lab measurements published online showed the opposite. I have my suspects though. I also don't doubt for longer lengths of interconnects balanced will win every time. Most lab measurements done by audio magazines most likely used very short runs of interconnects.
Fully balanced from input to output in theory should help minimize distortions as well but for that to happen, I think components matching has to be perfect. So I will not trust low cost fully differential amps because I believe they cannot achieve the goal of yielding all the theoretical benefits of fully differential while keeping the cost much lower than others at the same time. Parasound is a good example, at their competitive prices it will be very difficult, if possible, to double the component counts without sacrificing something else. It may be wise for them to invest on the best quality components while saving cost on not having to double the components count for fully differential implementation. In other words, you may get better result using 16 top grade power transistors than 32 second graders.
assumption). What I think I've also learned about XLR vs. RCA is that the noise floor would be lower in the XLR and, therefore, should produce "better" sound quality. Um... so... maybe I should've stuck with the XLR. Thanks again for all your input, folks. I'm learning, but it's a steep climb.