New Schiit AEGIR amp looks interesting

[Sam Lord]

On 4/6/2019 at 4:56 PM, crenca said:

 

I understand Mike Moffat has said "no" to the RCA to XLR trick explicitly on headfi and SBAF.  You could always email Schiit directly and ask them.

Well yeah, partly because those adapters aren't wired correctly!  See Rane notes #110 (Diagram #17, IIRC) about grounding.  All off-the shelf rca-xlr adapters can easily cause ground loops: the shields are attached at both the rca ring and xlr pin 1 and thus, usually, to chassis ground = bad.  The shield should *float* on the rca end, whose ring should only connect to xlr pin 3 (inverting input). 

 

In the case where the rca ring *is* connected to earth internally on the source, then the loop can be fairly free of hum, but that means the source is a bad design anyway.