Benefit from DAC balanced to pre/amp single-ended?

[Audiovideophile]

Greetings!

I own a Schiit Gungnir multibit DAC that includes both balanced and single-ended outputs. Since I’m using an AVR for my stereo (in stereo direct mode, with no DSP) and multichannel needs (for movies, with DSP), my only input option To the AVR is RCA. And that’s how I’ve had it set up for the last 2 years.
However, the other day I was on the Schiit website and noticed a photo of the inside of the Gungnir. It appeared to show 2 separate boards, one for each channel, for XLR output vs one board for RCA output. It made me wonder if there is any advantage to using the XLR output with conversion cables to RCA for the AVR.

I was also wondering how one can evaluate if a device—DAC, Pre-Amp, AVR, etc—is balanced throughout the signal path or just at the output connection. This would seem to make a big difference.

 

[gvl]

Unless you want to step up from the AVR to an amp with balanced inputs just keep using RCAs and enjoy the music. Cheers.

 

[dfuller]

Negative - the benefit from balanced is only if the entire path from device to device is balanced.

Part of why balanced has generally better performance is because it has a differential amplifier at the input - something that cancels common mode noise from interference. That's because it has both hot (signal) and cold (polarity inverted signal in differential balanced/signal balanced, and no signal but with the same impedance to ground as to hot in impedance balanced), and induced noise is cancelled by flipping the cold's polarity. The other reason is there is a dedicated common/shield that doesn't have to worry about any signal as unbalanced does, which eliminates ground loops.

 

[MondoAudio]

Great question. Clear answers! Thanks for addressing a question I've been meaning to ask for awhile.

 

[raif71]

Negative - the benefit from balanced is only if the entire path from device to device is balanced.

Part of why balanced has generally better performance is because it has a differential amplifier at the input - something that cancels common mode noise from interference. That's because it has both hot (signal) and cold (polarity inverted signal in differential balanced/signal balanced, and no signal but with the same impedance to ground as to hot in impedance balanced), and induced noise is cancelled by flipping the cold's polarity. The other reason is there is a dedicated common/shield that doesn't have to worry about any signal as unbalanced does, which eliminates ground loops.

Besides the advantage of ground loops elimination does using the balanced connection between dac and amp increase the volume compared with using SE rca dac to rca amp? Thanks