Please FFS people lose the silly XLR = balanced, RCA Phono = unbalanced rubbish that always pollutes the waters whenever this is discussed. The type of connector used has diddly squat to do with whether it's balanced or not. 90% plus of balanced connections will be made with XLR for convention and historical reasons but XLR's do have other uses and "XLR" definitely does not
mean balanced!!! I've had to load the shotguns with rock salt many a time I tell you when some ejit says "should I use unbalanced or XLR?"
The thread should lose the mention of interconnects also as it obviously has nothing to do with anything... so
"‘Unbalanced is Best'? a comparison of balanced and unbalanced" would be more accurate....
and relax...
Me? I prefer unbalanced. A sweeping generality based mainly on the way that most balanced facilities are afterthoughts for marketing reasons ("lets convince the punters that balanced is better then offer it as a reason to buy our top of the range stuff") and usually involve putting the signal through more electronics, often op amps. When the design of a particular piece of circuitry intrinsically lends itself to being natively balanced, and in an elegant manner, it can have some advantages (non of them the ones yer average audiophile will be thinking of!) but we don't know what it will be used with and it may well then be connected to another item of "balanced" gear that uses several op amps to convert the signal back to unbalanced before feeding it through the rest of the
often unbalanced circuitry.
Notwithstanding any of the above there's also the simple fact that different topologies sound different to one another... It's all too easy to compare say an unbalanced with a balanced amp and decide that all the differences are down to it being balanced/unbalanced when in fact it's down to how much feedback was used, grounding regime, frequency response and distortion etc etc, all the things that would effect the difference between
two unbalanced amps!
Ultimately the whole balanced V unbalanced thing is a technical discussion so we'll probably see nowt but "unicorn racing" with the technical and scientific integrity of "do gun-metal finished amps sound better than silver finished amps"
Anyone could be forgiven for thinking I'm rather cynical these days...