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Originally Posted by W9TR
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What I did not like about that article from Benchmark is too many assumptions of making the "worst case scenario" that the fully balanced headphone amplifiers are necessarily worse because of higher output impedance, more noise and distortion because of dual amplification per channel. While it is true that "some" not so well engineered examples could be indeed worse, there are plenty of examples of a well designed, fully balanced products that deliver. I've seen plenty of balanced headphone amplifiers that are very low output impedance and are not noisy by any stretch of imagination. It is Benchmark's choice to offer SE and not balanced and that's their business but making worst case scenario assumptions is not fair to other designers who believe they can make a great balanced design and actually are successful at it. My Bryston BHA-1 offers both SE and Balanced as a choice to the end user. I like that.
Whether balanced in headphone use is actually necessary or not is still a very much debatable subject but there is one fact that remains pretty obvious, not all headphone amps are created equal and not all of them drive various headphones to perfection.
I've come across designers who believe that balanced circuitry does not belong on high end audio period (not even talking about headphones here) and that single ended sounds clearly better because balanced circuitry introduced extra circuitry and op amps, etc... Yes, the gear sounded great in single ended if you were lucky enough to get away with all single ended in your rack and not have noise. At the same time, we all know that's not a fact but an opinion of that particular designer and there are plenty of high end audio products that also sound great while implementing balanced connections between components.