Aw geez, once again folks here set up straw-men solely for the purpose of setting themselves up so they can nobly slay them before the spectating masses and then take a bow for imaginary accolades of heroic wisdom. Or put more simply, for crying out loud, gimme a break! Nobody in this thread espoused the view that XLR's are inherently better than RCA's. Anyone who has read the leading audio mags knows that most of the better reviewers only have RCA IC's in their personal collections and if XLR's are the only option on a piece of gear, they borrow some from the manufacturer of the particular piece under review. But, when a component is designed for XLR's only, there is no choice. When a component offers both, setting aside the difference in gain, they sometimes sound different and sometimes they don't. Sometimes one sounds better than the other, sometimes they just sound different. This exact question posed by Stingreen, btw, has been covered here before. The responses are quite predictable. There is the camp that says no, all balanced cables competently made sound the same. There is the "all recording studios use Mogami/Belden and that is all you need" camp. And then there are the rest of us who say, "it all depends". Some of the most widely respected amps ever built don't offer true balanced inputs. Take Lamm gear for instance. There are XLR's on the back of Lamm amps but Vladmir Lamm is very open that they are "psuedo balanced".
