Geekria 4.4mm Male to 2.5mm Balanced Female Headphones Adapter for 2.5mm 4-Pole Cable Connected to Balanced 4.4mm Player Device, Aluminum Alloy Conversion Audio Plug, Gold Plated Adapter

Bought the male 4.4mm to female 2.5mm to connect to a portable dac/amp and the adapter works perfectly! Nice construction, solid connection, with no static or audio disruption. Great value!

I use Sennheiser HD 558 and 598 Headphones at both my gaming computers. But between my 5 year old and 10 year old they are extremely hard on cables. After paying too much for special Sennheiser replacement cables, I decided I would take both sets apart, remove the locking mechanism and use a 2.5mm Male to 3.5mm female adapter so i could use standard headphone cables. Initially I bought some cheap china adapters. Was like $7 for a 2 pack, and while they were basically a drop in option they just didn't hold up over time, when i move my head audio cuts out on one side. So I was back to square 1 looking for a solution. I bought a couple different adapters including one of these, it seems much higher quality and is a much tighter fit. Unfortunately it's not a drop in option. Its slightly larger diameter. I had to remove the chrome bezel and used my soldering iron to melt the hole out a bit larger. It looks fine, and I'm hopeful that this will be a final solution. I really think it will be, the quality is much better than the previous adapter, and it fits both the headphones and cable much tighter. I went ahead and ordered a second adapter for the other HD558 headphones. I do not use the balance feature of the adapter, so i cannot comment on that. However I can say it doesn't hinder anything either. It works fine, I have stereo sound, and maybe it's placebo but i'm 90% sure this adapter made them sound better and louder.

It's to allow you to plug a plain old single-ended aka. unbalanced aka TRS stereo 1/8" / 3.5mm headphone cable (think stereo earbuds) into a device like the Sony NW ZX-300 that has a BALANCED pentaconn output. It's not supposed to pass a balanced/differential signal. It's supposed to short out the common connection. Why would you plug single ended headphones into a balanced output? Loudness/efficiency, really. That's the only difference, regardless of the myths on the web. The particular Sony DAP I have plays DSD natively only through the balanced output. So that's why I bought and tested this.Works fine for me. You can plug an older set of TRS headphones into the single-ended output of the Sony, sounds great, or using this into the 4.4mm pentaconn balanced output, sounds equally great, and louder of course. Apart from the loudness, no difference. You're plugging a single-ended device into a balanced output. No smoke. No disaster.

I needed to pick up a 4.4 to 2.5 adapter for a pair of IEMs that I didn't have a custom cable for. I also didn't want to break the bank with a ddHiFi adapter or anything else pricey. The adapter comes packaged in a nice fabric pouch. I did test, and can confirm this IS balanced at both ends, so it does its job. The adapter is a little large all things considered, but the metal feels quality. No problems with fitment on either end. For the price, this is EXACTLY what you should expect, and is easily worth the sub-$10 price. I bought another just in case. You never know when you might need it.

TL;DR - Okay, this is my apology to Geekria. You get 5 stars for making a good product, despite my concerns about longevity due to weight hanging off the 2.5mm jack.In previous versions of this review, I was sure this was not a true balanced adapter, based on wording of the above marketing materials. I actually physically disassembled this piece, and I could confirm visually, that not only does the male jack have 4 poles, but the female jack does as well, and they are all connected by separate leads. In conclusion, this is a real balanced adapter. If used properly, with 3.5mm 4-pole balanced-terminated headphones, it should not damage balanced amplifiers.My only other concerns to note here, is that the 2.5mm jack isn't very thick, and having seen 3.5mm jacks snap easy, putting the weight of a larger connector hanging off the 2.5mm jack worries me. However, I understand it's better, in theory, to solder the 2 connectors together with as little distance/wire between them as possible.**NOTE** - I want to briefly speak on "stereo-balanced adapters" here, and state that the main difference between differential and shared-ground designs, from a performance perspective in regards to headphone driving ability is more power. When using balanced speaker setups, balanced connections have a greater ability to reject common ground noise, or hum over longer cable runs, in studios. Headphones generally have such a short cable run, that unless something is very wrong with your setup, balanced should not solve any problem you're having specifically with the sound coming out of your headphones. However, amp circuits designed for fully differential wiring should not be used with shared ground terminated headphones/cables. People much smarter than me say that you will damage an amp by attempting to do so, it's only a matter of time. Therefore, regardless of the above, I highly recommend that you DO NOT attempt to run your 3-pole headphones balanced with this adapter. BUT, you should feel no worry running this with a fully differential/balanced-terminated pair of headphones.