Can anyone tell me when XLR connections were first used on stereo equipment. (what years)?

@atmasphere Steve is a truly nice guy! He and I had many conversations, and all the while I was thinking, don’t you have more important things to be doing than talking to me? Nope, Steve always took time to speak to people, and for many years he was the one answering the telephone at BAT. 
Victor Khomenko was nothing short of a genius. Both of them built a wonderful company that still, some near 30 years later are building great gear. And I still have a VK5i preamp that still works. 

@coltrane1 Yes- they built a nice company.

They were several years after the next company we found after us to be making balanced line equipment; Jeff Rowland. IIRC their balanced preamp showed up about 1991.

I have a Burmester 838 phono preamp and an 868 preamp/DA convertor and two 878 amps, all of which have XLR connections.  Burmester used a system to identify his components : 838 [ August of 1983 ] 868 [August of 1986 ] 878 [August of 1987]. Year followed by month.  So, I guess my earliest guess would be 1983 that Dieter started using XLR connections.  Incidentally, his were 4 pin XLRs --- the 4th pin being used to "trigger" the on/off function if desired.  His adoption of "balanced technology" is credited to 1983.  I think I've got this right.

Levinson ML-26 has balanced pre-out and optional XLR instead of phono card. 

Note that there is a difference between XLR connection and balanced operation.  Much of the benefit of XLR connectors arises from being used with a balanced circuit,.  However, as Ralph mentions above, there are plenty of ways of having balanced in/out connections without using balanced circuitry throughout the device.

If you're shopping mid-fi, there's an increased chance of running into devices using XLR into a not-truly-balanced circuit.  I'm guessing that all of the brands mentioned above are fully balanced, but defer to @atmasphere