OTOH with short phono cables it’s all execution. whatever sounds best. possibly all things being equal balanced might be superior technically......but......of course.....all things are pretty much never equal. you have to listen to pick the winner. the LFD execution is crazy stuff. if LFD used XLR i suppose it might be even better..
You get the same benefit with short cables as you do long cables. The idea that balanced really only benefits you when the cables are long is a common myth. The advantages are several as I showed above, and these become more important when the signal strength is lower. Of course the LFD cable would work better balanced, as well as any balanced cable if built correctly.
@intactaudio is correct in his post just above. It really sounds to me as if all the balanced gear you've heard doesn't support the balanced standard; if that is the case then the results will be highly variable.
If you really want to do single-ended connections a 50Ohm coax is really the only way to do it properly without cable interactions, but to do so you need appropriate driver and receiver circuitry.
The funny thing is other than the balanced input on the phono preamp, running a proper balanced connection from the cartridge is actually easier than running single-ended. The arm wiring doesn't change; its all about the tonearm cable being built properly. You know that weird ground wire that other single-ended sources don't seem to need? That' s because its a balanced system being run single-ended and you have to do something with the ground, which isn't connected to the cartridge- that's the ground wire. When running balanced that is the shield connection (pin 1 of the XLR), which is a continuation of the shielding the arm tube provides, and its not able to intermodulate noise into the signal since ground is ignored by the receiver (in this case the phono input, which could be an SUT with a balanced connection).
So when running balanced the only tricky bit is that just like any phono cable, its best to keep the cable capacitance low so as to keep the electrical resonance as high as possible. With LOMC cartridges, this resonance is typically in the MHz region.
The hardest part about all this is something called the Veblen Effect. Literally people think that because they are paying more that there is more value. This isn't always the case! Veblen causes people to want to spend more on a cable, thinking that they will get greater performance/SQ. Its important to know that can sometimes be illusory.