I have a Groove Tubes Brick and a TL audio stereo preamp. XLR out on both units is transformer balanced TRS out is not. Does anyone see any problem with building an XLR to TRS cable to send the output of each preamp chanel to a balanced patchbay for patching into my recorder, keeping the transformer in the output signal? My recorder is an Alesis HD24. In addition, could anyone tell me why there is an unbalanced output on either of these preamps? What would it usually be used for?

thanks

No problem there. Make that xlr-trs and patch away to your heart's content.