Do Costly XLR Cables Make A Difference?

As @jetter stated in quoting Ralph it totally depends on the equipment you are connecting. If both pieces follow the AES standard there may not be any improvement noted. Unfortunately in reading a lot of other comments and observations by Ralph on this subject many, if not most, pieces of home audio do not follow this standard. Once the standard is not a factor then the quality of construction and quality of wire (either balanced or unbalanced) become very important in the performance of a system.

I get a kick out of cable reviews that sound like wine reviews.  You've written the review before you got the cable.

Good cables make a difference.  Expensive cables does't always mean good cables.  

I like to make my cables out of Mundorf Angelique wire.  Parts connection has seveal  nice choices of XLR connectors.

Jerry

Well stated @carlsbad.

Cables make a difference but rarely are they worth the price, and they are usually subtractive in some way.  That is, they limit treble or mid range making these expensive tone controls. We get excited to hear that a $10,000 set of cables made a significant difference in our system, and since it's 10x more expensive this difference MUST be better, but it's smoke and mirrors.

I use homemade balanced cables, shielded with pure silver wires and silver contacts and gave up on my expensive Wireworld cables entirely.

Your investments in room acoustics will pay much better dividends.

There are quite a few opinions here, but the best advice is for you to borrow cables from a local dealer or the Cable Co. and decide for yourself. There are so many variables, even aside from personal preference.