General Asylum

We introduced balanced lines to high end audio about 35 years ago

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In Reply to: RE: I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that we are in a New Golden Age of Audio... posted by John Marks on November 20, 2024 at 13:17:01

-with the Atma-Sphere MP-1 preamp, introduced in 1989.

It was the first home audio preamp to offer balanced line operation use. It has always been AES48 compliant while supporting +10dBm operation (we still make it and a smaller brother called the MP-3, which is also AES48 compliant and supports +4dBm).

We did that by use of a circuit we patented which allowed the tubes of the preamp to be direct-coupled to the output. As such it represents a 3rd method of driving a balanced line while supporting AES48 (which is to say the output floats and ignores ground).

The phono section as well as the line stage is fully balanced and differential. Since phono cartridges are a balanced source this, along with AES48 compliance at the preamp's output, allowed interconnect cables for the first time to be entirely neutral.

Since then it took about 10-15 years before balanced lines were accepted, and other 10 for them to become ubiquitous. Of course, there are a lot of high end audio balanced line products that don't support AES48 and would fall flat on their faces driving even +4dBm let alone +10. If you don't support the standards you start hearing differences in cables. This has given rise to the debate about whether balanced is better than RCAs or not. You'd never get away with using a digital cable that wasn't standard compliant- it might not even pass a signal! But with balanced it will play, it just won't sound right and you'll hear cable differences. AES48 compliance is important and is a game changer.

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