Turntable Placement Between Speakers with Short Interconnect?

Read the fine print. Many companies convey the suggestion that their circuit is balanced, when it ain’t necessarily so. XLR connectors do not necessarily indicate a balanced circuit inside. On the other hand, balanced is not necessary for your purposes. Nice to have but you can live without.

If you are planning to introduce an outboard standalone phono stage, as your last post suggests, then it too should be a balanced circuit internally, if you want to take advantage of a balanced connection to your amplifiers.  Using XLR-terminated cables alone, vs RCA, will not help much.

If you take the questionable advice of Elliot, to the effect that worrying about IC length is BS, at least be sure to purchase cables with the lowest capacitance possible.  Capacitance, not "quality", should be the determining factor.  I might suggest AntiCables as a company that makes very low capacitance, and good sounding, phono cables.  Also, using balanced ICs is a waste of money unless the phono stage inside your integrated is also a balanced design.

I can agree that there is a tradeoff between having the table "too close" to speakers and long ICs, but the quality of the phono ICs makes very little difference if they are 8 feet long, as proposed.  Or to put it a better way, quality per se is not going to make up for the extra long length.  And in this case, having the table to one side or the other of a pair of speakers is not necessarily any better in terms of feedback potential than having it in between the speakers.  We would need to know more about the radiation pattern of the speakers.  Also, given the monetary constraints imposed on himself by the OP, it hardly seems likely he would want to pay for very expensive ICs.

Mijostyn is correct, in my opinion. In these situations you want the shortest ICs between the cartridge and phono, and the longest ICs between the linestage and the amplifier. The amplifier should be situated as close as possible to the speakers, so you can use short speaker cables. That’s the ideal set-up. Since your phono, line, and amplifier are all on one chassis, you’d be best off with the electronics and the TT in between the speakers. At least that allows you to use the shortest possible ICs between TT and phono input, based on your description. But that’s very bad for acoustic feedback possibly affecting your phono signal. There’s no good answer, and even a Minus K is not going to protect the cartridge from airborne acoustic feedback. See what you can find out about the radiation pattern of your B&W speakers. With dipole speakers (which yours are not), your situation would be a little more tenable, since dipoles do not radiate much to the side. Perhaps with knowledge of the radiation pattern of the B&Ws you can locate a space fore or aft of the baffle that is less subject to speaker SPLs. But I would not opt for the choice to put the TT to one side or the other of the speakers, because that apparently would require 8 ft phono cables, a no-no in my book for any purist. And placing everything to one side also will require longer speaker cables, another disadvantage.