Balanced connections will considerably reduce susceptibility to ground loop issues and to noise pickup, regardless of whether the internal signal paths in the components are balanced or not. However, those benefits will be unnecessary in many setups. Also, some components that provide balanced interfaces but have unbalanced internal signal paths implement the conversion between balanced and unbalanced by means of an active stage which may be less than the best sonically, and may in some cases provide inferior results compared to bypassing that stage by using unbalanced connections.
Regards,
-- Al
Regards,
-- Al