The reason you go with balanced line is to eliminate any cable artifact, and by that I mean that you may have noticed that some cables sound better than others. That goes away with a properly set up balanced line system.
Balanced line and single-ended (RCA connections) are inherently incompatible. If you have one then its not the other. There is no such thing as pseudo balanced- that would simply be single-ended.
Now all phono cartridges happen to be balanced sources. Anyone saying otherwise is simply misinformed. The coils of the cartridge will work fine if they are hooked up backwards- all that happens is they are out of phase. If you did that with a single-ended source like a tuner you would get a huge buzz.
You know that little ground wire connection that most tone arms have? The one that other single-ended sources don't seem to need? That is there there to deal with the fact that a balanced source has a ground connection that is independent of the signal. Without it the balanced source, run as a single-ended source, will buzz. Its easy to hook up a cartridge in the balanced mode- in most cases you don't do anything with the tone arm wiring. Its usually about the interconnect cable that goes between the arm and the preamp. To do this, the preamp really does in fact have to have a balanced input.
The advantage of doing this is that the interconnect cable at the source of the stereo will not have any effect on the sound of the system. If you used a single-ended setup, the cable would have an effect and would have to be chosen with some care.
Balanced line and single-ended (RCA connections) are inherently incompatible. If you have one then its not the other. There is no such thing as pseudo balanced- that would simply be single-ended.
Now all phono cartridges happen to be balanced sources. Anyone saying otherwise is simply misinformed. The coils of the cartridge will work fine if they are hooked up backwards- all that happens is they are out of phase. If you did that with a single-ended source like a tuner you would get a huge buzz.
You know that little ground wire connection that most tone arms have? The one that other single-ended sources don't seem to need? That is there there to deal with the fact that a balanced source has a ground connection that is independent of the signal. Without it the balanced source, run as a single-ended source, will buzz. Its easy to hook up a cartridge in the balanced mode- in most cases you don't do anything with the tone arm wiring. Its usually about the interconnect cable that goes between the arm and the preamp. To do this, the preamp really does in fact have to have a balanced input.
The advantage of doing this is that the interconnect cable at the source of the stereo will not have any effect on the sound of the system. If you used a single-ended setup, the cable would have an effect and would have to be chosen with some care.