Quote Originally Posted by frenchmon
I doubt if the Rotel is truly balanced. I was doing some reading from Kal Rubinson of stereophile Mag over at Club Rotel and he seems to think there is still some benefit in using balanced connections when its not truly balanced. He says its not all for show. ...

frenchmon
If you have a long run of cable or if your environment has a lot of RFI/EMI, then balanced cables will help significantly by nulling out any of the noise captured by the cable between source and target. This why almost all professional equipment uses balance connections.

Note that having an XLR connector doesn't in itself quarantee the component has a balanced input/output. In some cases the '-' connector is simply routed to ground and does nothing.

If you want an actual balanced connection, if your component is inherently single-ended, if it's the source, it will need circuitry to generate the two, +/- balanced signals. If it's the target it will need circuitry to combine them. However you will get the benefit of cancelation of noise, thus extra circuitry can be worth it if you have conditions as described in the first paragraph.