Control room guitar question.....

This is probably more of a question of balanced/unbalanced cables...but...here goes. In our control room we are using a 16 channel(xlr) snake that has 4 trs line as well. I have tried patching the guitar through the snake and into the live room using one of the 4 trs lines via ts cable, had some noise issues with that (like maybe incapability between a trs jack and a ts cable), next, I tried patching a ts cable into a ts-XLR adaptor and then through an XLR line of the snake while doing the same thing from the XLR jack to the guitar amp (via another ts to XLR adaptor). This time it seemed like I was getting some major attenuation of the highs on the guitar, a particular bright set up (18w marshall through a 2x10 ear candy cab) sounded very dark.If I run a ts cable into an xlr (via adaptor), am I still balanced? or am I just using 2 of the 3 conductors of the xlr cable, thus being no different than using an extremely long guitar cable?

how do you guys patch guitars from the control room into the amp room??

Usually putting the head in the control room and the cab out in the studio so you're driving a high level amplified signal all that distance is the way it's done.

Radial makes a send/recieve system that'll handle guitar level at 300'. It's not cheap but if you really have to be able to send it a distance at guitar level...

http://www.radialeng.com/re-sgi.htm

Little Labs makes a device for us called the "STD" (signal transmission device) to handle this very application...guitar overdubs from the control room through a tie panel. It's a special cable and a receiver box that goes by the amp.