Fidelice by Rupert Neve Designs - Official Thread

Indeed!

It’s a problematic term in a number of ways - not the least of which is that manufacturers don’t even use it consistently. I have a dedicated thread on that issue, here.

And then there are all the consumer assumptions about it, which are often simply incorrect - which is hard to blame them for given the above industry-sown confusion.

Until you dig into the specifics of a given unit it is impossible to know what having a 4-pin XLR socket or the word “balanced” on it actually means (if it means anything at all). It can mean nothing more than the “balanced” output is just a convenience socket and isn’t actually balanced in any way shape or form.

With the Fidelice Precision DAC, it appears that the headphone output is actually balanced, and differential, (at least based on their published measurements) but then either has power-supply constraints that prevent the differential stage delivering twice the power of the single-ended, or the differential stages are being summed to provide the same power to the single-ended output (neither of which is necessarily bad nor good … it is what it is).

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