There isn't anything wrong or degraded with unbalanced connections either. Balanced simply offers passive RF rejection and a few more volts to define the signal with. Lets you run audio 100' with no penalty. Unbalanced can be just as perfectly silent and full fidelity. You might have to mind your cable orientation and stick to the shortest cables possible. In fact, someone will surely point out that there are examples of unbalanced connections that are more pure than a balanced connection with less amplifier stages in the circuit or sans the transformer for transformer balanced. (Assuming no noise issues in the example.) But there are 1001 examples of noise challenges with unbalanced that simply disappear with balanced and we like that.
All this modern gear supports plugging unbalanced into the inputs and from the outputs with the 1/4" TRS balanced/unbalanced jack. It's made to run unbalanced by shorting the ring (TRS) to ground or pin 3 (XLR) to ground.
If you are capturing analog audio from some older tape deck with unbalanced outputs, use high quality cables as short as you can get away with. Put on some headphones and carefully listen with the volume turned up with no intentional signal. Listen for rf whine/hum. If you hear something, turn the unit 90 deg (or whatever angle) and see if you can make it disappear. (Familiar with electric guitar and rf noise? Like that!)
