Location: North Island New Zealand
Posts: 1,757
I'm Chris.
Yes, both single-ended and balanced connections have a ground wire - no surprise there. Where the single-end connection has one wire for the signal, balanced has two - which is what I said.
Where a piece of equipment has a single-end output and a balanced output the balanced output is often 6dB higher than the single-ended. I don't think that's the same as improving the transfer of the signal by 6dB. In fact, I'm not sure what "improving the transfer of the signal by 6dB" actually means. A signal-to-noise ratio improvement, maybe?