RCA vs XLR and Balanced vs Unbalanced

As already answered above home distances are nowhere near long enough to justify XLR. I will go out on a limb right now and say all the info you will get on this will focus on technical jargon and totally miss the big picture. Which is, as also previously stated, quality matters in audio more than anything else. You can spend a fortune on high end components and then ruin it all by using long runs that cause you to cheap out on wire. Quality wire is so much more important than any technical considerations, but you can flail and flounder many years and never figure this out. It happens. I have seen it.

If you are forced by the layout of your living arrangements and traffic flow that is one thing. But if you are using long runs hoping to gain more in having things off to the side, forget it. Not happening. You will cheap out on wire, and this will cost you ten times what you hope to gain.

XLR vs RCA does not even factor into it. 

XLR are made for professional use where wire runs can be a hundred meters and there could easily be a hundred of them, on equipment being moved around a lot, connected and disconnected. All the features of XLR are made with professional use in mind. Connecting XLR for example the pins are designed to contact ground before signal thus avoiding the pop and noise of RCA.

The vast majority of audiophiles think professional must be better, that 20 ft is "long" and so on. If you want to buy into that you might at least want to consider how much of what you are paying for in XLR is features like locking mechanisms you will never need.

That is just the XLR wire part. Balanced means different things. In the vast majority of cases XLR connections are put there for convenience, for those who have XLR because they bought into that whole thing. But there is no balanced circuit. For the simple reason, a balanced circuit is two circuits that are then compared on the idea any distortion will be different, we will design the circuit to remove the difference, and wala everything is better.

Big drawback with this being quality in audio rules over all. Easiest way to make something better is improve the quality of the individual parts. Balanced circuits require twice the parts, so what do you suppose that does to parts quality? Right.

This is tough to do, but if you can find a fully balanced component with both RCA and XLR and identical RCA and XLR interconnects, so what is truly being compared is balanced/unbalanced, then you can hear for yourself what I am talking about. I did this once and that is how I know the above explanation is correct. You pay a big premium for things you simply do not need, and gain precious little for your hard-earned audiophile dollar.