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DIY RCA cable w/ balanced+shield

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Hi,

I am getting ready to put together a RCA interconnect. I ordered some NEI-3001 + DG301 from Soniccraft.

3001 has 4 conductors, so the 2 red go to the tip and the 2 blue goes to the sleeve. I am not sure how to connect the shield, to the source side sleeve, or the drain side sleeve?
 
Hi,

I am getting ready to put together a RCA interconnect. I ordered some NEI-3001 + DG301 from Soniccraft.

3001 has 4 conductors, so the 2 red go to the tip and the 2 blue goes to the sleeve. I am not sure how to connect the shield, to the source side sleeve, or the drain side sleeve?

Did you read the part(s) where the cable is 10.6mm diameter and the connectors accept cable up to 8mm diameter?
 
I finished it last night.

I believe Neotech made the DG201 to fit the NEI-3001 mk2. Internally to the DG201 sleeve there are fine screw threads that fits the thickness of the NEI-3001 exactly. All that was needed was to screw the NEI-3001 casing into that. There is no need to use the compression screws to secure the cable at all. It was a perfect tightness.
 
Jeff, when would you advise doing this rather than using coax?


There is not a right or wrong answer here. People use balanced cable for single ended connection because it often sounds better, because they don't know better, because they are looking for a particular characteristic impedance, because they want to partially decouple the shield, because they want to float the shield. There are lots of possibilities.



Those situations where a higher than usual ground return resistance is required?


Some balanced cables use larger gauge signal runs than most coax shields, so I would say not.
 
A coax shield is likely to have lower resistance than a signal wire within a cable, even if the shield uses thinner copper. Of course, you could have a thick twisted pair with less resistance than a thin coax.

I can't think of a good reason to raise the ground return resistance, as it means that any ground loop current develops a voltage here rather than somewhere else where it may do less harm.

I suspect that most people do it because it is popular. It is popular because a lot of people do it. Fortunately, in most situations it will do little harm.

I can think of one situation where a twisted pair inside a shield is appropriate for an unbalanced connection: when the source is electrically floating so a pseudo-balanced connection can be used. The most common example is an MM cartridge.
 
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