Yes, cables do make a difference -- regardless of price...

The hardware part of the system is simple:  Audio Technica Cardioid Condenser Microphone AT2035 connected with a XLR cable to the Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 preamp.

@crozbo I've said this many times on line; if your equipment supports AES48 then the interconnect cables will hardly make any difference. I don't think that mic supports it, so you'll have to audition the cables to find the one that works best for you.

Its pretty amazing to me to see how mics have changed over the decades; that you can buy a large element condenser mic now for only $150.00! I'm sure that's given a lot of people access to making music that were shut out before.

But to make a mic at that price you have to cut some corners somewhere, and I suspect that it does so with the tiny preamp that's built into the mic. If it references ground, then cable immunity is out the window. IOW it might be a balanced output, but it doesn't support AES48, the balanced standard. The Audio Technica site doesn't say, so this is theory on my part. 

We use Neumann U67s in my studio, running into custom vacuum tube mic preamps, which drive the recorder directly, bypassing our mixer. You can put whatever cable you want in that setup and you don't hear a difference. But the Neumanns have a proper floating output which is the only way AES48 can be supported. They also have no problem driving 150 Ohms, which is a typical microphone level input impedance (quite different from the 3KOhm input of the Focusrite).

These sort of things have to be taken into account when making statements about cables. When you have the lower impedances of the pro equipment, cable differences vanish.

“flat earther” denotes someone who disregards all scientific evidence for the earth in fact being spherical, while demanding no scientific evidence to support the belief earth is flat.

@benanders In the audio world “flat earther,” and as it’s used here, refers to people who can only believe what they see and can’t get their heads around that there’s a bigger picture and that not everything can be described by measurements.  People here who can actually “hear” that bigger picture realize that the human ear is a pretty darn good measuring device if you have enough experience and know how to use them.  For those who can’t (or won’t) get it, good for them and just buy lamp cord and live happily ever after.  To each his own. 

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.

@audphile1 "You’re probably one of the very few that kept an open mind. Majority will not.".

On that note, those who already know the difference have no need to debate it further, and usually don’t respond. Some NaySayers enjoy debate, and often times have no record of actually testing some of the better cables themselves. Just talk.Talk is Cheap.