ken tends to make a lot of kind of basic, amateur errors that you'd expect to hear from "audiophiles" and are generally discarded by real engineering professionals and math or physics nerds, which is a little bit disappointing. one example is his insistence on using balanced cabling in a home studio, which is sort of laughable given that he won't ground his circuits correctly (by connecting half to the grid and half off of it). if you ground your signals, you won't need to balance your cables, ken. and, how much noise is your furnace creating, anyways?
balanced cables are great if you're playing in a hockey arena, but if you're experiencing noise in your home studio then you probably want to address it at the source, rather than waste hundreds or thousands of dollars on cables in order to improve a number that your ears can't actually perceive. i guess there's a theoretical point where you have so many cables that some noise is inevitable, and that is the situation where you either need to buy balanced cables or fucking clean up that goddamned mess, but this is obscure and not really relevant in real life.
on top of that, balanced cables only go so far in cancelling the noise. i mean, they're not a magical bullet. if you live directly underneath a noisy gas furnace that was installed in the fucking kitchen (which was the situation i found myself in a few years ago...), your puny balanced cables will do nothing.
so, it's a minor solution to a problem you probably don't have - and if you actually do have a serious interference problem, it almost certainly won't be good enough to actually fix it. in both cases, you really want to focus on reducing noise, rather than blocking it. and, if your environment is as bad as mine was, you need to build a faraday cage - or move.
these are the kinds of debates my dad's friends used to have, and he sounds every bit as clueless as they did. so, there's some humanizing of ken marshall going on here - a name i had only previously seen in liner notes, as a contributor to the back-of-the-house sound engineering on a lot of my favourite records (specifically, those by download and skinny puppy).
but, i'm going to keep up with this out of curiosity. while he hasn't said much that has blown my mind yet, this is a sort of an invaluable resource that i wish i knew was there from the start.