All, thank you for your comments, however from some of them, it seem I didn’t make things clear. The Luxman is an integrated amp with RCA pre outs, there are no balanced outputs. The speakers sound better with the active bass units driven from the pre amp but only have XLR input, hence the need for RCA to XLR adaptor.
As stated in my original question, I cut the connection between pins 1 & 3, effectively floating pin 3 leaving only pin 1 connected to the earth tag. This stopped the amp cutting out but introduced significant hum.
Hope this clarifies things. Thanks