Thanks everyone for your help. I see now, that for short distances, a
regular unbalanced connection will be just fine for my needs--that is to
hook up a cheap mixer to my sound card so I can record sounds from an xlr
mic. I'd been using a regular instrument cable (ts mono) with a 1/4" to 1/8"
adapter on one end to make the connection and I wasn't sure if this was
creating unwanted noise that could easily be eliminated with the simple use
of a balanced cable. It sounds fine to me as it is but I was just curious if
it could sound better.