No. The turntable will output balanced to the phono stage, then RCA to the preamp (0.7m), then optical to the speakers. At least that was the original plan.
I could go balanced all the way, end to end, with different components, but that's likely overkill as my interconnects are 1m or less. I think the only place a balanced connection helps is from a MC cartridge output to phono stage.
Like I said before, in abstract terms and divorced from a specific application, balanced
can be an advantage when unbalanced yields too much noise. When unbalanced does the job then balanced has no advantage, i.e. they both meet the spec and they are equal in practicice.
In the world of phono, experience shows that unbalanced works fine nearly all the time. I think we can therefore safely assume that buying into Pro-Ject's balanced TTs, carts and phono stages has no practical advantage in terms of the audio signal. If someone's TT rig is experiencing perceptible noise then there are likely ways to fix that without needing to replace with balanced.
(So Pro-Ject's balanced smells to me of a classic audiophile marketing trick: Talk about a real technical difference between this and that as though it matters when in the given application it really doesn't and upsell to the more expensive. Subject the technobafflegab in this market to close analystic reading and you find the trick is used all over.)
There's a downside, however. It locks you into a much smaller "ecosystem" of interchangeable parts. That might not matter if you don't want to mess around with parts but for me it's undesirable. I prefer compatibility with as much gear out there. So I'd want a detachable headshell (Technics-compatibile since it's the most common), a moving magnet cart, and unbalanced phono output with RCA connectors.
One last personal blather thing: TT tech reached its zenith in the 1980s. The R&D that has gone into it since then is relatively very small (because CDs, digital downloads and streaming). Unsurprisingly then, many of the best TTs made new today are well-built versions or adaptions of 70s and 80s designs and are no better than the old gear except they come with warrantee and parts and service may be easier to find. As others have pointed out above, some of the old gear is hard to beat when it's in good nick. So when I look at the current offerings and marketing of Pro-Ject and Rega I just can't help wondering: What are they really trying to sell me? Is it the
feelings that come from luxury shopping,
à la LVMH, or is it a tool? A bit of both, if I try to be fair, but the correspondences between luxury and audiophile are a turn off for me.
This is a good read:
The year is 1877 and Thomas Edison presents his “Phonograph” to the world. It wasn’t the only device able to reproduce recorded sound but it was the most reliable. The medium in this early machine was the “Brown Wax” cylinder, which was not actually composed of wax but made of a metal soap...
www.audiosciencereview.com