Diving into balanced

Thanks all.  As a follow up, is it well accepted that balanced is better? 

Balanced is clearly and technically "better" but in most cases the human involved cannot tell the difference anyway. 

I’ll be the outlier; go 1.5M. You never know how the system will evolve and next thing you know you have the units next to each other and one set of outputs and the other inputs are on opposite sides from each other due to other system needs. Then, you’ll thank me!

Also, 1/2 meter cables are very hard to resell.

Have a great weekend.

You will not discern an audible difference between balanced and rca with an interconnect run of one meter ... now, six meters may be a different story.

Max Townshend and Andreas Koch both feel that RCA's have more "pure sound" due to the additional circuitry of XLR's. So unless someone is going for long distance cables, I think good RCA's are better. I swapped out all my XLR's for Townshend F-1 Fractal RCA's. 

Some components like Jeff Rowland's new amps only have XLR inputs. So the decision is made for all.