How much difference between balanced XLR and RCA

I have heared many times that RCA out of a CD Player sounds much better than XLR. I think you should try yours out and see if it does or not.
Note: I use all XLR

Most important is the signal fed into any cable, balanced or RCA. Even the 'best' balanced cable can't improve a bad signal. The Meridian is a very nice piece of equipment, so if that sounds better to your ears, forget about the type of connections and enjoy the music.

Eandylee, a differential amp is one where each of the signals is run through it's own amplification stage: Right hot, right neutral, left hot, left neutral. This requires a very careful matching of output devices (e.g., FET's). That's my understanding but I'm not an engineer so I may have misinterpreted something along the way. In any event, they are best served by XLR cables. My phono preamp will not accept an RCA and I had to go through some very interesting cabling mods to get everything to work right.