Who says cables don't make a difference?

There's never been any doubt in my mind that they make a difference, but I've always felt they were pretty subtle differences and I have focused more on the quality of the cable and connections and whether it was good for the application I used it in.  More than anything, my main goal was to do no harm.  

I've used some cables that degraded the quality of the sound, but haven't heard any in my system that made a big improvement.

That was until the other day when I bought some fairly expensive interconnects (used at a good price) and inserted them between my phono stage and preamp.  It made a pretty noticeable improvement in sound quality and I have been playing a number of records I'm very familiar with and it's like hearing some of them for the first time.  If it's all in my mind, well... whatever.  I'll keep enjoying that placebo effect I guess.

The length of your hair or the speed of the air moving in your music room makes more difference in sound than cables.

Have I stumbled onto a rerun of 12 Angry Men? 😡 😤 🤬 😩 🤪 😤 🤨 😢 🧐 😠 😛 😡

The same cables dont create the same difference in different audio system and embeddings.... Their impact results is not also related to their price....

These are the reasons  behind all these debates....And at the end cables makes most of the times way less impact than the rightful controls of the 3 embeddings of the audio system....

Then people speaking about cables often dont owns an audio system rightly embedded; because if their system would be rightfully embedded they will not speak so much about  trivial matters and evident perceptible effects of cables in any refine and minimally rightly embedded audio system....

So I am relatively new to the IC cable game. When auditioning cables what specifically should or does one hear that makes a difference? Like every other NOOB out here I want the best of the best but only because marketing has convinced me of that.  I have Ace of Spades taste but a DP budget.