XLR or RCA for Odyssey Stratos amp

I'm going to upgrade my cabling from my balanced pre-amp to my amp and would like to know if anyone has heard a sonic difference between using the single ended or balanced inputs on the stratos amp? I've been told that the balanced inputs simply attach to the RCA inputs so my guess is there might be little if any differences. When I ran a balanced cable from my DAC to my pre-amp, both truely balanced, I noticed a nice increase in gain. This was not unexpected. Since my amp isn't balanced would I notice the same gain increase in this scenario? I've switched to all Acoustic Zen interconnects and this is the last one on the chain. I'm going to use AZ Matrix for this connection and if all things are equal will look for an XLR type.
Any insight would be appreciated.