I believe 90 percent of the time, people who buy this utilize unbalanced RCA inputs. I had a customer for whom I recommended XLR for channels 1, 2, 4, and 5 with hais center channel in unbalanced. 1 and 2 were running a bi-amp to his Klipsch Towers. His AVR had XLR for his front speakers only. So it plays either Balanced or Unbalanced, not both at once. Just plug and play automatically; it senses what you have connected. We are coming out with configurable multi-channel amps 4, 6, or 8 channel unbalanced only.
TimL/3-23