A "balanced" cable is merely a shielded cable with three conductors. An "unbalanced" cable has two. The difference is in the signal that runs along the cable.
With short cable runs it makes little difference. With longer cable runs, balancing the signal makes a huge difference. The issue is to what degree is the cable going to pick up electrical interference. Because cables act as antennae, a longer cable is going to be a lot noisier than a short cable. Patch cords - unbalanced is probably fine. Anything under a couple of feet - probably fine. Six foot, ten foot, twenty foot cords - you will hear a difference between a balanced and an unbalanced signal.
A balanced signal uses a principle of line polarity to silence line induced noise. Two hot conductors traverse the cable. The signal on one conductor is reversed in polarity at the source. Both conductors pick up electrical interference which we hear as cable noise because the cable acts as an antenna. The noise or interference is picked up on each conductor with the same polarity, same everything.
Upon reaching the destination, the signal on one conductor (including its newly acquired noise) is again reversed in polarity. The two signals are summed. The main signals are at the same polarity and reinforce each other for a true, clean signal. However the noise signals are now in reverse polarity, each to the other. They cancel each other out and you hear silence instead of the noise.
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