Please clear up my confusion re: meaning of "balanced" !

@stuartk

given the dac, the question would/should be to aqua la voce -- it is the piece that is without true balanced circuit at its outputs, whereas the jotenheim surely is... as is clearly stated 

in any case, if the cable run is short, should be ok... both are high quality pieces

I’m simply wanting to know whether connecting the Schiit Jotunheim to my Aqua La Voce S2 with a pair of XLR IC’s could result in noise or signal loss.

It won’t result in noise or signal loss.

100% certain Schiit and/or Aqua HiFI will confirm this.

Were you using a differentially balanced DAC with the Schiit Jotunheim, then there is a possibility of less noise versus connecting single ended (RCA connectors + cables) due to the inherent noise cancelling of balanced topology. Would you hear quieter operation? Possibly. It would largely depend upon the noise floor of your system.

You can easily experiment by alternately connecting the Schiit Jotunheim and Aqua La Voce S2 with XLR interconnects, and RCA interconnects (ideally from the same manufacturer and model range to eliminate a variable ).

@tvad:

OK.   I misunderstood your previous post.
Thanks for correcting my mistake! 

I'l go ahead and order the Jotunheim. 

Well, things won't work right if you connect a phono RCA jack to a line-level RCA jack, or a consumer-level RCA jack to a pro-level RCA jack, or an analog audio XLR jack to an AES/EBU XLR jack, or a component video BNC jack to an audio S/PDIF BNC jack. So sometimes the same jack doesn't mean you can connect the two things—but I'm being pedantic only to avoid the potential for misunderstanding. But no, doing so shouldn't cause a fire and shouldn't make anything break, just things won't work.

Likewise, you should use the correct cable type (specifications), independent of the connection type. Sometimes it won't matter, or won't matter much, but sometimes it can negatively impact the signal if you use the incorrect cable type.

I guess connecting a line-level XLR output to an XLR microphone 12V phantom power input might cause damage to the output gear.