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I have two home stereo amplifiers in different rooms. I tried connecting Zone 2 with (the other room) with 50 feet of RCA cable and noticed there was some noise (I live right next to an AM radio tower and my house has some pretty bad electrical wiring).

I then switched to what I thought was rather crappy 50 feet 3.5mm TRS (unbalanced) and the noise went away.

Has any one noticed that TRS is better than RCA? If so my question is why don't home receivers/amplifiers just use TRS instead of RCA?

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    I don't think that a TRS vs. rca is at question, likely the TRS has better shielding. Can you verify?
    – filzilla
    Commented Mar 23, 2012 at 23:48
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    Its Philamore 28 AWG TRS. Its CL3 rated (I was planning on running the line in-wall. I think I the reason it does better than the RCA is because both signals (L,R) are very close to each other (its one cable) compared to my RCA that has the L, R as separate cables.
    – Adam Gent
    Commented Mar 24, 2012 at 1:57
  • Measuring the differences between two unbalanced cables with different plugs is meaningless when you can just run balanced audio.
    – Brad
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 5:59
  • @Brad I can't afford an end to end Balanced audio system. The inputs to my stereo system are unbalanced. I wish I had a nice enough system that had balanced inputs.
    – Adam Gent
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 16:15

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Essentially, this is going to depend on the cable and the quality of the connectors. The connector type has nothing to do with the quality. Ideally, you would want to split the channels (left/right) and run a balanced line-level signal in a situation like that. 50 feet is a very long distance for unbalanced cables.

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  • I know its probably not the connector type. Its the fact that the L and R are practically on top of each other with TRS. With RCA there are two distinct cables. As I was telling @Brad I would love to have an end to end balanced system (balance inputs) but alas I don't have that kind of budget.
    – Adam Gent
    Commented Mar 24, 2013 at 16:17

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