More: The XLR is designed to hide interference and not make for a cleaner transmission of electrical signal if you don’t have hum or static, usually only a prob if you have speaker wires more than 30 ft or run parallel to power cables. We know from work of cat 5 going to cat 6 cable that the more twists the faster the conduction. With the XLR there is hardware in the source unit and in the speaker and other connects. Remember RCA and speakers are alternating current. In the XLR the wave forms on the pos and neg must be in phase or 180 out of phase? Idk about that part but phase changes with different instruments at different frequencies so an occiliscope sine wave might not be the whole picture and I am going to leave that to the audio engineers and audiophiles. What I do know is that when comparing the alternating current between the relative pos and neg at any point in time, the signals are compared by the end hardware. If they are not human but are zombies from another wave length (interference) then it is dumped into the third wire (ground?). Anytime you don’t have the source and destination connected by an XlR then there is no link to the two hardware comparing protocols that can talk to each other through the 3 wires on the XLR
So for example, take an XLR source then XLR cable the XLR to RCA adapter cable. This can work but you just lost the 3 wire connection between the two pieces of hardware the talk to each other on each end. This is unbalancing the communication /feedback chain.
So, to put it short, if there aren’t a bunch of cables nearby ti cause an induction of current from amps, 120v power etc then XLR balancing doesn’t make any sense if you are looking for better quality music. Better to focus time and efforts cleaning your stereo wires and speaker cables. If you have to cross a 120 volt wire then do it at right angles. If your DAC and amp and if you use a pre-amp all have XLR’s then why not just use them. If you don’t then just follow above advice.
Good Luck to you
