"As far as i understand, it's because unity gain is 4V instead of 2V in balanced so you get different loudness but if you push the max loudness before clipping you will see SE will go louder before clip."
Not sure what you mean, but if you use the 4.4 mm interconnect between dac and amp it gets 4v. with RCA in variable on the dac it get 3.2v i think. in fixed it gets around 2v. Is this what you are referring to? It's louder in variable than fixed because of this which makes sense.
But if I run it with RCA in and BAL out, the balanced is still louder than SE. I dont have the 4.4 interconnect cable.
You can see here that it clips at 12db gain in SE out but it clips at 6db gain in BAL out.
Is this with volume all turned up? What does the 6 after 12db and 5 after 6db stand for?
And I still don't get why the BAL out gets less efficient than SE with low impedance cans. With higher ohm HP it's a lot more efficient in BAL.
Thx for the amp suggestions. I live in DK and schit are all out of stock in EU and has been for a while now.
I'm getting a balance HP cable soon and replacing the stock RCA. I have two stock IFI RCA's and just cut the one open to see whats inside. I don't know much(anything) about cables but not much material here:
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