Yes, considerably. You can't use balanced out to regular RCA, because regular RCA has
1 pin, XLR has
3 pins (hot, cold, ground). You *cannot* bring both + and - signal to single signal line like RCA without an active transformer. What a single cable would do, is short one of both lines, and pass the other. So 4 volts, half will be
shorted and other half (only 2 volts) goes through RCA.
Many DACs will not like shorted output, and might perform drastically worse using an XLR to RCA adapter.
Just use RCA to RCA. There isn't much of a sane reason to use XLR>RCA, unless you need 4 RCA lines for example and take two from unbalanced and two from balanced. Same caveat still applies, though. However, there exist floating cables which do not short, like here. $54 for a pair, quite pricy..
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