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I have noticed a number of posts disqualifying the Rotel 1098 from consideration due to lack of balanced connections. I stumbled upon a few interesting articles that explain pros and cons about balanced connections.
In a nutshell, unless you have serious noise problems or a high-end system with fully balanced circuitry throughout, the quasi-balanced connections in the worse case provide sound quality inferior to RCA connections (due to an additional signal conversion going from unbalanced to balanced) and in the best case simply add cost to your equipment, money which could be better spent on higher quality DACs, power supplies, etc.
From a marketing perspective, balanced connections are pitched as being superior, while from an engineering perspective they can be a serious compromise in getting best value for the money sound.
From Stereophile
Balance: Benefit or Bluff?
http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?335
From Arcam a white paper explaining why their flagship FMJ AV8 preprocessor does not provide balanced connections.
http://www.audiophilesystems.com/arcam/BalancedView.pdf
Anyways my 2 cents worth.
In a nutshell, unless you have serious noise problems or a high-end system with fully balanced circuitry throughout, the quasi-balanced connections in the worse case provide sound quality inferior to RCA connections (due to an additional signal conversion going from unbalanced to balanced) and in the best case simply add cost to your equipment, money which could be better spent on higher quality DACs, power supplies, etc.
From a marketing perspective, balanced connections are pitched as being superior, while from an engineering perspective they can be a serious compromise in getting best value for the money sound.
From Stereophile
Balance: Benefit or Bluff?
http://www.stereophile.com/showarchives.cgi?335
From Arcam a white paper explaining why their flagship FMJ AV8 preprocessor does not provide balanced connections.
http://www.audiophilesystems.com/arcam/BalancedView.pdf
Anyways my 2 cents worth.
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