How to change XLR balanced to RCA unbalanced in a cable?

[highfigh]

He's floating pin 3, which may or may not be fine, but apparently nothing's blown up so far.

Didn't he post that he tied 1 and 3 together? That's not floating pin 3.

 

[highfigh]

Well I did all the cables up by jumping all the 1 and 3 pins together. The bad thing is it trips out my parasound amp now. I wonder if by doing this it increased the signal to much and the amp cant handle it anymore. Does that make sense?

Not all manufacturers use the same pin assignments, even though they should. Pin 2 should be signal Hot (normal) and pin 3 should be signal cold (inverted) but some reverse these two.

I would check with any documentation for the Adcom and Parasound pinouts.

 

[Josuah]

Do you know of any manufacturer who recommends not jumping pins #1 & 3?

I believe the Lavry DACs require you to switch an internal jumper or flip a switch. The reasoning makes sense to me. If you've got an op-amp driving the output such that Vin is non-zero and it wants to keep its +/- voltage difference zero, it needs to induce a voltage at the output to supply the current needed to accomplish this.

Didn't he post that he tied 1 and 3 together? That's not floating pin 3.

Maybe I misread.