First, thanks to everyone for keeping this discussion civil and keeping the flame throwers at bay. The purpose of this post was to communicate my experience with a direct mic to track example.
I commonly hear people say that they want their system to sound like the "real thing". But of course that is never going to happen since you do not know what the "real thing" originally sounded like. What you mean, I suspect, is that you want it to sound like your interpretation of what you think the "real thing" should sound like.
The purpose of our little experiment was just to get her modest voice recording set-up to sound as good as it could with some advice from the good people at ProAudioLA and Sweetwater. Since I had all these different XLR cables it made sense to try to optimize the sound with resources on hand.
No elaborate A/B/A/A/B/B/B/A testing just her voice, reading the same passage with each cable and running all these segments back to back. So, in playback there was a four segment level matched continuous track where you could determine the differences in recorded voice quality. We liked segment 3 the best, which happened to be the Mogami cable.
In this situation, we were there, knew what live sounded like, and liked how segment 3 best represented her voice. That is all. Nothing more and nothing less.