Thanks SO MUCH for these reply’s this helps a TON.
Sit tight with me, I’m going to make a photoshop mock up right quick and post it to see if my thinking is right, and I’d LOVE yalls critique.
It’ll take me about 10mins. Brb
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Ok, but the ground is still the third contact, yeah?
And yes, that’s what I’m saying. This circuit reduces noise! 
Yeah if you want to think of it in those terms. You’ve got three contacts or conductors in the cable. One is the original signal. The second is that signal but 180 degrees out of phase and the third is ground. The numbering may differ between manufacturers, I’m not sure, but most semi pro/pro gear will usually give you that info in the manual or sometimes as a graphic somewhere on it. Common terms are Hot, Cold, and Ground.
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Yes you need a ground for the circuit to work and both signals are referenced to ground. I thought you were saying that the ground in a balanced system was in some way a different ‘noise reducing’ ground.
Ok so the third is in fact ground.
I guess in practice it’s easy to identity the connectors due to the presence of the third, but that third (ground) isn’t really responsible for the noise reduction – it’s the fact that the other two are out of phase.
Thanks for the clarifications!
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Yup. 
It may be better to think of the third conductor as the out of phase as the in phase and ground are common to both unbalanced and balanced systems if that makes sense?
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EDIT: LOL, in the time it took me to write this up y’all have answered it much better! I’ll keep it here in case saying it a different way helps anyone, but yeah. “What everyone else said.” 
The thing is, there is no 100% correct. Sometimes you just have to understand what’s going on under the hood to make the right decision based on circumstance.
I think understanding this will answer most of these questions for you.
Let’s start with plain-old-unbalanced audio. It’s voltage going over a wire. For electrical reasons that you don’t technically need to understand, voltage can’t happen without a lead and a ground. So to send voltage over “a cable”, two wires are actually required: one for the lead (sometimes called “hot”) and one for ground (sometimes called “earth”).
This is what a TS cable is. It contains two wires, one of which is tied directly to the tip, and the other of which is tied to the sleeve. When plugged into a device, the part of the device that touches the sleeve uses it as a ground and the part that touches the tip uses it as a lead. Cool!
But (again for electrical reasons you can just take my word for) voltage traveling over a wire creates fields that can extend a surprising distance around the wire. And anything that interacts with those fields can effect the voltage going over the wire. This can cause noise (or, if not “noise” per se, signal that you didn’t intend to travel over the wire).
Balanced audio prevents this in a kind of ingenious way. Rather than just having two wires in a cable (one for the ground and one for lead) it has three! One for one for ground, one for lead, and one for the inverse of the lead.
Why is that helpful? If anything affects the fields of the wires, it will affect both leads the same way. Then, on the other end of the cable, the device inverts one of the leads and sums it with the other. The parts that are signal are the same and just get louder. Cool! But the parts that are noise are now the exact opposite of one another and cancel out! Genius!
But for this to work, your cable has to contain three wires connected to three different parts of a jack. There are two common ways to do this: TRS, which adds another segment to the jack called the “ring” that carries the inverted signal, and XLR, that provides three pins, one for ground, one for lead, and one for inverted lead. (This is a key point: XLR and TRS are just two different jacks for doing the same thing: Connecting to a cable with three wires)
This is, as I say, really cool. But you don’t really need to worry about cancelling out noise in your cables if there’s no noise there to begin with. Cables are all wrapped in insulating rubber, so for short solitary runs, there may not be any noise, so (as others have pointed out) you may not need a balanced cable. An unbalanced cable (having 1/3 less wires) is usually cheaper. Can you just use that?
Usually, yes. If you look at a TRS connector, the ring (that carries the inverse signal) is where the “sleeve” of a TS connector is located. That means, if you plug an unbalanced TS cable into a balanced port, the inverted signal will be sent to ground. And as long as your gear is properly grounded (not always a safe assumption), that signal will just disappear. On the other end, a device expecting a balanced signal will take the flat signal of the ground, invert it (still a flat line), and sum it with the lead, which won’t change anything because a flat signal + anything equals that thing.
But it will be quieter than a true balanced signal because a true balanced signal will actually sum a pair of signal when canceling out noise. In practice this means a balanced signal is about 6db hotter than an unbalanced one.
But…
That should be the end of it, but there are actually two types of balanced connections. “Balanced” and “Differentially balanced”. When we talk about balanced connections, we usually mean “differentially balanced”. This is the kind where there’s an inverted copy of the signal on one of the lines. Regular plain “balanced” is the same except it doesn’t send an inverted signal. Instead it just “catches” noise to be inverted and sum’d out at the end. This type of balanced connection does not boost signal by 6dbs. So you really can’t rely on balanced connections being louder or unbalanced connections being softer. It all depends on the implementation.
Here’s the thing, though. TRS cables are also commonly used to carry stereo signal (tip = left, ring = right, sleeve = ground). If you take a cable carrying a stereo signal and plug it into a thing expecting a balanced signal, what happens? It will take the left and right signals, invert them, and sum them! This will usually cause the signals to cancel out and result in near silence or bad phasing.
(TRS is also commonly used for “insert” effects on mixers where the tip is the send and the ring is the return. Mixing this up with something expecting a stereo or balanced connection will obviously screw things up spectacularly!)
So there’s no simple rule for when to use TRS or TS because they’re all used for different things. In general, if you use TRS for all things expecting stereo (on both ends!) and TS for all things mono, you won’t get any benefit from any balanced connections your gear happens to support, but everything should behave as you expect. But ultimately, there’s no substitute for diving into manuals, laboriously drawing out what ports expect what, and making sure all your wires are providing that. 
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Most excellent description! I doff my proverbial cap to you👍
@bodymechanics Scroll to that post for all you need to know
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Oh no! Is that a RNC on the top left? Because if so, all bets are off and you’re better off just splitting everything with a TRS to two TS adapter.
Actually for the split outs on the RYTM, the cables going to the mixer would be TS correct?
You would be fine to use unbalanced cables throughout that set up, put the savings somewhere you’ll be able to hear them.
Seriously, everything you’re running is high output/low noise yielding… even if all the cables were 10m long, you still wouldn’t hear a difference when you’re playing music.
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The savings?
And where else would help with low noise?
Running all power plugs to 1 power strip?
Yeah I forgot to correct that, but that’s how I run the RNC. TRS out of master inserts to TS into the RNC
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Cool, cool. The RNC and RNLA do really weird things with TRS that you wouldn’t expect. I can’t remember what without crawling behind the rack at my studio (that I’m away from for a week), but I remember having to really scrutinize the manual and route everything just so. Surprisingly complicated for such a simple device.
So worth it, though, as it sounds freaking phenomenal.
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Working on the assumption that the balanced version of cables you’re considering are more expensive than unbalanced.
The only place I’d definitely want balanced with that setup is XLR-XLR out of the mixer to your monitoring.
Power wise, it doesn’t hurt to have surge protection, but I can’t see any noise being introduced that way either.
Your setup is very ‘clean’, if you had mics/passive instruments (sources that are sensitive and can pick up interference) it might be different, but I couldn’t see any issues with what you have.
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I would just add something I only discovered this month by using unbalanced cables with gear that happen to be made for balanced ones : it would still works but you lose up to 6db. Don’t know the science behind this but I can attest the fact it’s louder with balanced ones.
Not all balanced connections have the loss of signal you describe, it depends how the equipment implemented the balanced connection. It was mentioned somewhere here on Elektronauts, but I’ll be fucked if I can remember where.
Edit: IIRC they said Elektron boxes doesn’t have that problem
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