Balanced Headphones
A typical headphone plug has three connection points: left, right, and ground. The speaker driver in each earpiece gets either the left or right drive signal delivered to one of its terminals and the ground on the other terminal. This is called a "single-ended" drive scheme when one terminal is connected to drive and the other is grounded.
But there is another superior way to power headphones and that is to drive both terminals of the headphone simultaneously, one side with the 'normal' drive signal and the other side with an identically inverted drive signal. This is called a "balanced drive" scheme. 'Phones of this type require a special balanced headphone amplifier and special headphone cabling terminated to XLR 3-pin connectors.
The simply huge, huge advantage of this type of drive signal is that it generates twice the effective slew rate and output power for a given signal amplitude AND the left/right earpieces are not sharing a common ground that can cause signal crosstalk, muddy detail resolution, pinched dynamics, high background noise floor issues (like hiss & hum) -- among other nasty-sounding things! The principal sonic gain of these high-end balanced headphone systems is the MUCH more liquid, deep-sounding, and precisely clear soundstage image available on balanced-terminated headphones.
A few additional models and cable lenths are available via special order, please contact us for details.
You must have a balanced headphone amp to use balanced headphones. HeadRoom offers the Balanced Desktop Amp, or the all-new Balanced Ultra Desktop Amp and companion Ultra DAC.
For more information about balanced headphones visit our balanced headphone selection guide.
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>>Learn more in our balanced headphone articles
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