I've had a few poor cables over the years, balanced and unbalanced. In the main, cable differences, for me are to do with how bendy they are, how easy they coil, how nice they are to strip and solder - stuff like that. Some might have foil screening, some braid, and other conductive plastic screening with a drain wire. The only electrical spec that matters in capacitance if you intend sticking guitars through them - I've found them fine for even normal line level High Impedance sources - just not some guitars and piezo pickups.
On the star quad front the stripe thing is a bit of a 'red herring' - most common star quad cables are NOT made like telecoms cables with striped connectors and cable lays like network cabling, although to be fair, they make excellent audio cables too - most Canare, and specialist cables use simply two colours - red and white, or blue and white etc. So you join the same colours. It goes wrong on some German quad cable as it is red/yellow/white/blue and you should join the red and white, and the blue and yellow. Only some brands do what they do0 with data cables and have different lay lengths - as in when the twist has done a complete rotation. Most are simply twisted.
Remember that the extra rejection is only measurable when you go a very long way - so if you have to feed a cable through your generator farm 500m away, then it might be worth checking, but for a ten metre cable? Forget it. Joining the wrong cores (as I have done many times through ignorance and not reading the spec) makes no difference.
It is fair to say that I started using star quad a long time ago when I also supplied lighting - so the stories of crosstalk between power and data and audio worked me. I bought star quad and had noise free audio. Then I began to (not) notice that ordinary mic cables also gave me noise free results, and I've hardly bothered since.
If you have time and some speaker cable, it will put things in perspective to make up an XLR 3 to XLR 3 with speaker cable between pins 2 and 3, no connection at all to ground. Plug in a dynamic mic and discover a perfectly quiet hum-free mic. Move the cable near things to experiment. You can often virtually touch these unscreened cables to the wall-wart type power supplies before you hear and noise, and that's just because one conductor is closer to the noise source and the hum cancelling lessens.
A few star quad might help, but this is one of the physics and folk lore mixes. Telephone cables on their posts across the countryside are not screened at all and has anyo0ne ever complained about hums?
Conductive plastic is not the best shield, but cables that use it are very flexible.
Cable that is stiff, or cracks, or won't lay flat is the enemy. cheap types that are copper covered aluminium are hard to solder, stiff thick braid is easier to short out in the connectors - etc etc - this is far more vital than being concerned a cable has a 21mm lay. 164pF/m is a decent figure for capacitance, but so is 91pf/m from a competitor? I'd pay more attention to a review that said "This cable is rubbery and tough and coils really easily"
