You may have hit this spot on - I've a Lavalier mic with a 3.5mm TRRS male plug designed for an I phone - supposedly when plugged in, it is not supposed to turn on the headphone part. Rather, it is just supposed to activate the mic, so you can havé an audio trac' with a vidio.
I'm going to attach the mic to my flute and want to plug it into my amp's guitar female plug which is female 1/4". So I don't need balance for stereo or headphones. My goal is to simply put the music signal into the amp's "music" input plug so I can use the amp's controls (gain, reverb, etc.,) on the flute sounds. I'm told that the TRRS Female plug may not work with a TRS adapter: that the signal may be out of phase?? I did get the right size adapter - Hosa GPM - 103 - that is a TRS, but I don't know if it balanced.
So, two sub questions - do I really need a balanced signal? And, does it matter on this set up if I'm going TRRS -> TRS?