Of course, you must consider both the amp and headphones. Classic Sennheisers (HD600, 650, 800) tend to benefit much more from balanced more than other headphones. In general, headphones with a large soundstage benefit more from balanced drive. The Focal Utopias, Grados and closed/wood Audio Technicas (e.g. ATH-L3000), all headphones with fairly small (if not claustrophobic) soundstages, didn't benefit much from balanced drive to my ears. In some cases, e.g. with planar dynamics, you may actually require the extra power (up to 4x) and/or gain (up to 6dB) provided by balanced drive. But for most dynamic moving coil headphones, the extra power/gain by itself is far from necessary.
With amps in my experience, the old balanced amp topologies that used opamps seemed to suffer greatly downwards from their maximum performance in SE mode - e.g. RSA Apache, Headphone Balanced Home/Max. Whereas the all discrete Head-Amp Gilmore designs (GS-X, etc) all do fantastic in either balanced or SE modes - but then power supply has a very strong impact on sound quality there. I've also heard tube amps and hybrid circuits do superbly in "just" SE mode.
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