Does it have a shield? Does it have two wires in it? Then it's a good enough cable for 99.99999% of home studios. Seriously, I've heard no audible difference in normal use between the light-duty installation cable I use for my drum kit mics and the heaviest, most well-shielded cables I've used. Maybe if you're running at an exceptionally high gain for a low-output ribbon mic, it might matter... maybe... but probably not even then, realistically speaking. In a home studio, the rustling of your hair in the slight breeze from convection currents rising off your torso is likely to make a more audible difference....
Where the difference between cables can be important is if you are in an electrically noisy environment. If you're going to be in a theater around lighting dimmers, you'd better have good shields, and perhaps more importantly, the outer metal sleeves on the XLR connectors MUST be grounded if you ever plug one cable into another. If you don't do this, you WILL get hum, and it will be massive.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in terms of sound quality, I wouldn't worry about it unless you are experiencing problems.
Now if you want to throw build quality into the mix, my advice would be to get the heaviest gauge cable you can find, and only use cables with a braided shield. Thinner wires and wires with foil-and-wire shields are fine for permanent/semi-permanent installations or for occasional use, but they really don't hold up well. Fortunately, you're unlikely to encounter either unless you make them yourself....
Put another way, with the exception of actual miswiring of the cables (failing to hook up the ground pin, failing to hook up a signal pin, or hooking two cables with ungrounded shields together), the components of a good recording in order from most important to least important:
- performance (voice quality, musicality)
- room/location (environmental noise, reflections, etc.)
- song (does it suck?)
- competence of the engineer (including microphone placement, mixing ability, etc.)
- microphone
- preamp
- converters
- dithering vs. truncation vs. rounding
- dithering algorithm
- clock jitter
- use of balanced vs. unbalanced line-level interconnects
- color of the performer's jacket
- phase of the moon
- barometric pressure
- mic cable quality
Any questions?
