As has been pointed out, balanced is not inherently better sounding. A balanced signal is simply two unbalanced signals, one 180 degrees out of phase (mirror image). The you subtract one from the other - common noise cancels. That's it.
It is more immune to both ground noise and pickup of noise over long distances in noisy environments - like factories or concert stages.
Worse, the simple, common way to create balanced I/O is to add an opamp or other circuitry to create it - and every circuit, no matter how good, adds a little distortion and noise.
There are a bunch of reasons to use balanced - for example to run stereo amps as monoblocks - and yea, i advertised this as a feature on my amps/preamps 25 years ago - and it was true! And sounded great! -- but it used inherently balanced circuitry (not one extra part, not one), and quadrupled the power.
That said, 99% of the time i personally would run the simplest system possible. RCAs.
Plus, you save money on cables - generally lots. Spend that on something truly useful.
As to RCAs preserving absolute polarity - strange comment. So do balanced connections. Actually, absolute polarity is really a function of whether the circuitry inverts or not. If it does, well, swap the speaker leads :-) Problem solved for $0.00
G
It is more immune to both ground noise and pickup of noise over long distances in noisy environments - like factories or concert stages.
Worse, the simple, common way to create balanced I/O is to add an opamp or other circuitry to create it - and every circuit, no matter how good, adds a little distortion and noise.
There are a bunch of reasons to use balanced - for example to run stereo amps as monoblocks - and yea, i advertised this as a feature on my amps/preamps 25 years ago - and it was true! And sounded great! -- but it used inherently balanced circuitry (not one extra part, not one), and quadrupled the power.
That said, 99% of the time i personally would run the simplest system possible. RCAs.
Plus, you save money on cables - generally lots. Spend that on something truly useful.
As to RCAs preserving absolute polarity - strange comment. So do balanced connections. Actually, absolute polarity is really a function of whether the circuitry inverts or not. If it does, well, swap the speaker leads :-) Problem solved for $0.00
G