HappyPantherFan
Member
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2023
- Messages
- 13
- Likes
- 9
Hello, and please forgive me for this basic question. The point seemed not to be discussed anywhere.
I was auditioning the Genelec G1-4 speakers, and upon switching from G2 to G3, it got shockingly louder. The rest of the swaps went seamlessly, even when unplugging G4 and switching to those sacred 8361As.
Now as I understand, there’s no intentional sensitivity difference in the entire line - if Genelec took any care, they’d eliminate differences in sensitivity instead. Both G2 and G3 house 50W+50W amps, while the latter supports XLR connections in addition to RCA. The input was balanced XLR terminated in RCA for both of them.
The simple explanation to the volume difference, me thinks, was that the RCA plug was transmitting the full v+v- signal, discarding the ground pin instead of one of the hot pins. The unbalanced-only G2 somehow saw only the v+ signal, while G3 and beyond took (v+ minus v-) and got twice the voltage. That’s a 6dB increase.
But wait, are we not measuring the difference between tip and sleeve in a ‘proper’ un-balanced connection, like, comparing the remote v+ with the remote ground?
It sounds totally insane to me, that the signal were defined as remote v+ against local ground in an unbalanced connection. If the output is floating at 1/2 supply voltage, that will translate into a 6V DC offset at the receiving end! What have I missed?
I was auditioning the Genelec G1-4 speakers, and upon switching from G2 to G3, it got shockingly louder. The rest of the swaps went seamlessly, even when unplugging G4 and switching to those sacred 8361As.
Now as I understand, there’s no intentional sensitivity difference in the entire line - if Genelec took any care, they’d eliminate differences in sensitivity instead. Both G2 and G3 house 50W+50W amps, while the latter supports XLR connections in addition to RCA. The input was balanced XLR terminated in RCA for both of them.
The simple explanation to the volume difference, me thinks, was that the RCA plug was transmitting the full v+v- signal, discarding the ground pin instead of one of the hot pins. The unbalanced-only G2 somehow saw only the v+ signal, while G3 and beyond took (v+ minus v-) and got twice the voltage. That’s a 6dB increase.
But wait, are we not measuring the difference between tip and sleeve in a ‘proper’ un-balanced connection, like, comparing the remote v+ with the remote ground?
It sounds totally insane to me, that the signal were defined as remote v+ against local ground in an unbalanced connection. If the output is floating at 1/2 supply voltage, that will translate into a 6V DC offset at the receiving end! What have I missed?