Single ended or change to Balanced ?

If your player is single-ended, it cannot easily be made to be truly balanced. One could add another active stage, an inverter, to create a balanced signal, but that would be conterproductive (an extra stage the signal goes through) unless you are running an extremely long interconnect between the player and your linestage or amplifier and need a balanced signal to cancel common mode sources of noise.

i have found if all the pieces are truly balanced, then you will hear a difference. also, balanced is better for long runs but only if your components are truly balanced.

First of all balanced does not always sound better then single ended and many times it does not sound as good, depends on the equipment and the matching of that equipment. If your CD player is single ended you will be wasting your time and money using a balanced cable with an adapter and unless a cd player is truly balanced which yours is not, trying to convert it to balanced will be a waste of time and surely degrade the sound since a player to be truly balanced must be balanced throughout, not just at the output stage.Better to try a higher quality single ended interconnect or just leave everything alone.
Mike

I have a krell kav 300d that I connect to my krc3 though balanced cables - I had some problems with my balanced interconnects (some old MIT proline - the right cable just died), and switched to single ended cables for awhile - I was frankly pretty surprised at how much worse the single ended cables sounded compared to some pretty cheap blue jeans balanced interconnects that I just got. With the balanced the music is just much more "there" if that makes any sense.