balanced shmalanced..........unless all your components are differentially balanced, you will not get the improved performance.
This statement is false. The Ampex 351 tube tape electronics were used to record a great deal of classical and jazz recordings done by RCA and the like. Its internal circuitry is entirely single-ended except for the push pull output it has driving its output transformer to drive a 600 Ohm balanced line. The input used an input transformer as well. This allowed the tape machine to have microphones a good 150 feet from the machine with no degradation of the mic signal. This was long before an exotic cable industry existed. You might say that the balanced line system itself was the exotic cable industry prior to Robert Fulton creating his first ’Fulton cable’ back in the late 1970s.
Similarly if an input transformer is used with a LOMC cartridge (and the transformer is properly loaded to prevent ringing) then the tonearm interconnect will have far less effect on the sound of the system.
Its arguable that this is the one place you really want to get it right!
The advantage of running a cartridge balanced is of course to minimize any artifact from the cable- meaning an inexpensive cable can sound just as good as one costing 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more!
Now it is a fact that if the phono circuitry is fully differential that there is additional benefit (for example in our phono sections only two stages of gain are required to work with a LOMC cartridge run straight in- you get theoretically 6dB less noise per stage of gain). But balanced lines can be executed with single-ended gear if good transformers are used. Users of SUTs take note! All transformers including SUTs can be used to receive the cartridge signal in the balanced domain.
