Singxer

[Hifi_swlon]

RCA to Aes/EBU is suboptimal, it'll probably work but you loose the balanced signal path and will cause an impedance mismatch.

I'll let this page do the detailed explaning: http://www.rane.com/note149.html

Thanks Antoine, a fountain of knowledge as usual.

I'd never really looked at this stuff - it's not surprising AES is often better considering the voltages/current used? Regardless of the balanced aspect, this must surely be better for countering noise etc?

The thing that made me think RCA to AES was people saying connecting their companions this way was better than RCA>RCA. It also makes me wonder why AES (or even network cable connection) wasn't the default?