Seeking recommendations for DAC to amplifier balanced XLR cable

@tomic601 It would not be easy as balanced has 2 signal wires. At this point I don't believe it would make a difference, anyway. I feel it's time to go back to music and stop upgrading for a while :-) It all sounds wonderful now. Amplifier and DAC are great and I am down to just one interconnect: the balanced (Sommer Epilogue) XLR cable from the DAC to the amp. CD and Node 2i + disk w/ FLAC all go to the single DAC.

... which suggests that spending any more than about $100 per pair is a waste of money. Possibly Mogami Gold would similarly be indistinguishable from the Sommer I am using 

In this case, the less expensive (but balanced) is not just equal but preferable (albeit very slightly). Will be selling the rest

@magneto340  I would go with Mogami Gold. I am using Sommer Epilogue (imported from Germany) and I am very happy. Good quality XLR balanced cables should all be the same, I think. No reason to pay for exotic cables.

@soix @david_ten I need 1 meter, but can be less if I move the DAC closer to the amp. I trust your recommendations...

@david_ten What is SR?

@david_ten Perhaps not a fair comparison indeed. I don't quite believe in cable break-in, but I am going to give this newcomer a chance. I was just trying to listen to it but I had to switch it over to Colorado, the lack of clarity was so annoying. I think the not broken-in cable would be harsh. This one is not, it just misses detail. I doubt that this effect will improve with time.

@gdnrbob I have Mackenzies RCA. Good, but I slightly preferred Colorado RCA. Considering Mackenzie XLR though, as I don't want to pay a lot for that balanced interconnect

Budget: around $500. Currently using Colorado RCA, but was hoping that balanced cabling can beat that Colorado. Sommer Epilogue doesn't. I look for detail, transparency, space. On some musical pieces, eg. electronic music, very sharply defined sounds are present. Colorado renders them; Sommer fuzzies them up.

Acoustic Zen looks interesting but $840.
Nordost Frey, around $1,500.
Kinda steep ...
I was wondering if simply another Colorado or Mackenzie would do the job. $840 is a good chunk of the $1,100 I paid for the DAC itself. But if I can find used, I can try that.

@david_ten Thanks. I found them. Which ICs from them do you enjoy?

@soix I will go for AZ Silver Ref. I hope they are not an overkill for my RME / Musical Fidelity setup.

@david_ten No, I haven’t ordered anything yet. The listings of yesterday were for cables longer than I need, looking for 1m or less. I was even considering UpscaleAudio but that’s $840 :-(
But I’d like start explorations w/ this AZ cable @soix mentioned (and that I see consistently reviewed as great)

@soix @david_ten Update. Please read my original post to see what I had been trying to achieve. It turned out, the problem was not with the new cable but with output reference level setting on the RME ADI-2 DAC. The manual recommends +7dB setting for HiFi; it also informs that XLR is by 6dB louder. I did set +7dB and it was great for the RCA. However, balanced was not simply just louder, it was also distorted. Someone on a Polish audio forum, and at about the same time on the official RME forum (after long and heated discussions about voodoo, magic, illusions, etc.)  finally suggested adjusting the reference level correspondingly; I set it to +1dB so it is +7 again with the XLR boost. I didn't think about it myself not having prior experience with balanced connection; I thought that this +6dB is something specific to XLR, and that both the DAC and the amp will be in agreement about this higher level. Well, this is not so for the MF M6si!
Now with the +1dB setting the Sommer Epilogue XLR sounds fantastic! I have yet to compare it back to AQ Colorado RCA (with reference level back to +7dB). But the sound is already detailed, spacious, dynamic, not colored -- just as I wanted, so perhaps I shouldn't mess with this topic anymore :-)   I don't know if Acoustic Zen Silver Reference can beat my current sound appreciably. 

@soix Sound is terrific; listening to Ricardo Villalobos "Re: ECM". I find it interesting that on 2 forums (not this one) people attacked what I heard, and then attacked various "audiophile myths" and marketing that I am not even interested in, spoke about illusion, and more, before one guy (on the Polish forum) suggested the effective and simple solution :-)

https://forum.rme-audio.de/viewtopic.php?pid=150056

BTW, do you think that the AZ can still improve anything? Is it worth the effort/cost? I have doubts and "better is the enemy of good."

On a related note. RME makes available bit test files for devices sending digital output to the ADI-2 DACs. I copied these files to a USB stick, put it in Bluesound Node2i which now serves as my network transport and "played" them on the RME ADI-2. I played them on both (MUTEC) Toslink optical cable, and Mogami 2964 coaxial. All tests pass! -- except 32 bit samples as S/PDIF transmits "only" up to 24 bit (this is as expected). This means Node2i works perfectly and so do both inexpensive cables (this Toslink is about $6; coaxial was $45 but only because I fancied a "nice" one, a $7 Hosa from B&H should do exactly the same trick). No fancy cables needed here.
After making sure that both optical and coaxial work perfectly, and therefore work the same, I kept the optical connection between Node2i and the RME DAC, while moving the coaxial to the digital output from my 27 year old ADCOM GCD-600 CD player (5 CD changer). I have just burned one of the test files, corresponding to Redbook (16/44) parameters onto a CD-ROM and "played" it as well -- again the test passed, so now I know that the CD passes all the WAV bits perfectly to the DAC. The DAC is therefore the heart of the system now, converting music from 1) CDs played on the old CD player, 2) streaming from Qobuz received from Node2i, 3) my FLAC files from an external disk connected to Node2i. Only one interconnect is needed, I can sell all others. Only the single balanced XLR cable, in my case Sommer Epilogue 1m) runs from the RME DAC to the MF M6si amp.
The whole system is greatly simplified, perfected, and (bit) tested. It is not very expensive, either. And, I might add, sounds real nice :-)

This is Sommer Epilogue:
https://shop.sommercable.com/en/Cable/HiFi-Home/NF-Phonokabel-Stereo-Paar-Epilogue-QuadCore-HighEnd-EPB1.html

Matthias Carstens, the designer of the RME ADI-2 DAC said on his forum:

XLR cabling has several benefits - no ground loops, better SNR, lower noise sensitivity. The quality of these cables does not matter much and they are not expensive, so go for them.

Balanced cables are designed to cancel out noise. This relatively inexpensive Sommer Epilogue in the XLR configuration sounds no worse than AQ Colorado in RCA. At this point I have doubts if messing up with cables is going to make any further improvement -- but, if I could try-before-buy, I am open to experimentation.
 

After 4 more weeks with Sommer Epilogue XLR we compared it to Audioquest Colorado RCA which I had been using previously. Please not that we are not comparing apples to apples because Sommer is balanced. Finding number 1: the two cables are pretty much exchangeable, it is very hard to tell the difference. But Sommer is around $100, while the AQ Colorado was $450, 50% off list $900. A total waste of money. Finding number 2: if really hard pressed, I'd prefer the Sommer XLR to the Colorado. This can mean, however, that XLR is preferable between RME ADI-2 DAC and MF M6si.