The very fact that you'd suggest "generic" cables would be somehow detrimental to the signal would lead me to believe that you wouldn't be satisfied even if Tom Holman (the TH in THX) personally showed up and approved the work. While I don't USUALLY like to throw around credentials as some kind of excuse to say whatever crap I feel like, as an electrical engineer that is into audio and video stuff, I can definitely say that only extremely poorly designed cables will be detrimental to the sound. I am using non-specific cables (well, for the audio anyway). http://www.roger-russell.com/wire/wire.htm has some more info on amplifier->speaker wiring, and while not all of that directly applies to line level connections, the basic theory is the same. Anything of sufficient guage for the signal you're putting through it will be ok. Just don't run the cables next to the power wires and oyu're all set.
If anyone cares, I built my own s-video "cable" by way of building a couple s-video to dual f-connector breakout cables, and then I ran that over separate RG6 cabling, so thats how I hooked the LD player up.
Since you did ask the otherwise fair question "how exactly was it done" i'll just say that I hooked the analog outputs of the CLD-97 to the line in on my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, recorded at 48khz, and made sure it was close to full level without actually clipping.
Basically, if you didn't find a problem with the audio in the first set, you won't find a problem with the audio in this set either. The analog in on a TBSC has to be at least as good as the analog in on a sony TR7000 digital8 camcorder. Even if it is a more "technically accurate" manner of recording, syncing a digital rip of the audio to the video would be far more of a pain in the ass and imperfect sync will be more of a bother than the quality lost due to going analog to digital to analog (since it has to be resampled ANYWAY, why not just let the ADC on the sound card do it in the process of recording?)
Last bit of info... I checked the brightness, contrast, and color of the set on a crappy directview CRT, and it seems to be as good as I hoped. The color saturation will be FAR better this time around. If you look at the original set, the title scroll in each movie is very pale whitish/yellowish. This time, every color that should be saturated IS saturated, rather than over or under. The title scrolls are unmistakably yellow. Red is red, green is green, blue is blue. Skin tones aren't weird purplish crap, but actual human looking. Lightsabers look considerably better than they do even in the SE DVD release. What it comes down to is, it looks good on my monitor (which I'd like to say is well calibrated, but I don't want to assume its 100% perfect) and it looks good on a TV, and i'll test it on my Panasonic AE700 projector that should be arriving this thursday. If it looks good on all 3 devices, then the main movie video is definitely done. If I don't like it, I'll recapture the entire movie again and tweak it. I don't have enough space to store all ~7 hours of video on my hard drive in huffyuv format, but capturing it again isn't that much of a problem compared to hte length of time it takes to compress it properly. Nonetheless, I like what I've seen so far, so I BET it should be good.
Thats all for now.