balance and single ended what I heard

follow up I slao have Mac mc275 1V...same result also,rcas sound much better, maybe the Monster balanced cable is just a bad sounding cable, dont know it is the only one I have tried....Also read many comments on this forum from people who haven't heard the gear or casually hear it in a store (with umpteen variables) and make comments....All my comments are from actually owning the gear or hearing it my house for a reasonable time...I have heard quite a bit of gear and found,forget price..you just have to listen.

Just because someone (MacIntosh) offers balanced inputs or outputs doesn't mean their gear really runs balanced. If they (I don't know this to be the case) are just adding another output into the path without the benefits of true balanced circuitry there would be no improvement.

I have heard a lot of equipment and I have found you rarely get what you paid for, and you never get more!

This just proves there are NO absolutes and most opinions---well, are just that.
Noise cancellation is one major benefit to being balanced and most improvements are in this area. To hear what you are hearing would lead me to believe that your equipment at some point is not truly balanced or some other overlooked factor in connections is skewing your results.
Balanced connections in and of themselves will not cause what you are hearing.
Balanced connections will not prove useful if one leg is grounded (as mentioned above.)
My thoughts would be to not conclude that all balanced systems behave as yours. This is certainly not the case. I use balanced equipment in the truest sense of the word and balanced connectors DO improve the performance.
A quick example of equipment with XLR's that is not balanced would be the Sony SCD-1 that a lot of folks like. It is a waste to use balanced connectors with it.
Another example is the Aesthetix Calypso preamp that actually converts single ended to balanced internally not visa versa if you happen to ignore their recommendation and/or have to use single ended.

maybe thats it,maybe the outputs aren't truly balanced, I guess I will call Mac and see what they say...at the very least I would have figured they would sound about the same if that were true, but like you said above there aren't any absolutes

Balanced interfaces is a different subject than complementary circuit topography. There is nothing wrong with generating a balanced line output interface out of non-complementary circuitry so as to exploit the merits of that kind of interface. The suggestion that such a design is almost deceitful is absurd.

The best known example of complementary circuitry is the push-pull power amp output stage, and there is a small army of people saying that single ended is better. But that is the subject of a different thread.