[monkeyboylee]

okey dokey, so its all on the headphones and eq then! thanks again, thats cleared that up for me.

 

[gregorio]

okey dokey, so its all on the headphones and eq then!

 
Well no, mostly it's on the quality/type of the recording, then the headphones and processing (EQ, crossfeed/HRTF). For headphone playback only, you might want to have a look at some binaural type recordings for example.
 
G

 

[Roseval]

As I understand balanced connection you have a ground and two signals, one is the inverse of the other. At the receiver hot and the inverse are compared and all the difference between the two is considered noise and eliminated.
 
In case of a headphone, you normally have 1 ground and two signals, L and R
You can split the ground into 2 wires L and R .
This is the same as how we connect 2 pair of speakers to an amp.
Nothing balanced about this type of connection.
Hence no common noise rejection as far as I could judge.

 

[gregorio]

  As I understand balanced connection you have a ground and two signals, one is the inverse of the other. At the receiver hot and the inverse are compared and all the difference between the two is considered noise and eliminated.

 
Pretty much but you've made it sound a bit like there's some comparison processing or magic going on! 

Effectively, from the transmitter, say a balanced amp, you have a the original signal on the "hot" wire, which is duplicated and inverted (180deg out of phase) on the cold wire. At the receiver, say a speaker, the cold wire signal is inverted (-180deg) back into phase. The signals from the hot and cold wires are then summed resulting in: Our original signal +6db (signal x 2) and any interference picked up across the wires during transmission becoming out of phase when the receiver inverts the cold signal and then phase cancelled when the signals are summed.
 
G

 

[watchnerd]

  Hiya, its the Pioneer XDP-300R, states 'linear-phase FIR equalizer'?

 
That doesn't really tell much...is it a PEQ or just a regular n-band equalizer?

 

[pinnahertz]

   
To summarise what others have effectively said, you'll get no noticeable improvement from either. It's a bit like asking which of the following will improve your car's performance:  A "turbo" sticker on the back of your car or painting flames down the side. This is not an accurate analogy though, because unlike the audiophile world, neither turbo sticker manufacturers nor car painters claim their products actually improve performance!
 
BTW, also as mentioned previously, all commercial recording studios run balanced setups because they're typically high interference environments which also require cable runs of several (or more) tens of metres, so the noise rejection properties of a balanced setup typically have an impact. Your headphones probably have a cable length of only 3 meters or so and are used in a low or moderate interference environment, therefore no audible benefit.
 
G

3 meters would be a pretty long headphone cable, but even so, headphones are about 30 to 300 ohms, and require a bit of power, making them even more noise-immune.