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

@kraftwerkturbo
The company I was working for was building a new set of studios from the ground up and money was not a problem custom everything including famous speaker designer who came in and designed the speakers and wall they were mounted it (he didn't care about the speaker cables) so the engineers did lots of tests and ended up using Romex as the speaker cable for whatever reason they said it sounded the best. I've heard of people trying RG59 coax and had the same results you did. These examples are preferences (I like strawberry or vanilla ice cream better) this is what happens when there is so much confusion. Audiophile cables of over a few hundred dollars each should always have unmeasurable differences or else there is a problem with the cable.

OK there are 3 major problems that audiophile people have that no audio engineer who records or mixes music concerning cables has and that is 
#1- Of course a cheap cable is not going to sound very good there are many reasons why poor quality cables don't sound good from being to thin to oxidation to having crimped ends. Audiophiles who compare inadequate cables to well built cables are comparing apples and oranges.
#2- I started my sound career 40 years ago live mixing and editing radio shows, the other editors always listened at 2.5x speed it was hard for me to understand the dialogue at first but after my brain "burned in" I was able to edit at fast speed. That to say your brain is variable it compensates for everything in the sound world and when you pay 10k for your AC cable you will hear a difference, there are definitely many emotional reasons but zero technical reasons.
#3- The description of the way cables make a difference include words like warm, airy, tighter low end, and imaging. All these things can be measured and measured very easily and accurately with way more resolution than your ears so those descriptions are proven incorrect. If the description were less technical like "musical", "beautiful", or "pastoral" then you could say there is no measurement for that, and ok who can argue with that, but that is not the case in most of your descriptions in this group. 

Have you ever thought of the fact that like AC cables the cable isn't what's important but the connections and the first connection inside the equipment. For some reason people think a crimped connection to a connection that only pressure scrapes to make an electrical connection on the opposite connector, most of the connection on connectors aren't good enough to support 100% field flow of electrons. A soldered connection at least uses a tin and silver mix that makes a good flow but even every soldered connection changes the chemistry. If you spend 10k$ on your cable and then it enters your equipment and flows through a fuse then a trace on a PC board you can't convince anyone that the 2 meters of 10k$ cable is helping, in the case of AC the wall sends the power through 12ga Romex. No one has ever explained how miles of AC power then transformers then wall plug then 10k$ cable then fuse then cheap internal cables will make the 10k$ audiophile cable effective. I asked every cable maker at AXPONA how this could be effective, only 1 maker had an answer that the cable acted as a reservoir of power that conditioned the signal. OK no, nice try. How do such smart people not look at basics?

@kirk9 
Thanks for the note, but what I was getting at was the idea that only current moves in any circuit voltages and resistances change but current is the only thing that moves because current (I) is the measure of electrons moving by a specific point in a circuit, a coulomb of electrons is 1 amp. 

I know this isn't an exact analogy but suppose you have constant pressure water source connected to a garden hose then connected to a fire hose then a 2 inch hose then a straw is the fire hose  (the expensive AC cable) going to make any difference in the amount of water coming out the end of the straw, the answer is no the water is limited by the resistance of the hoses in total not the resistance of the fire hose.

I understand AC hits a transformer then rectifiers change the AC into low voltage that works in your equipment, right there is never any music in the AC and this is a very easy circuit to design and it works great if your equipment is of any quality at all you will not need to worry about power. Don't get me wrong I've got probably 30k$ in power for my audio room but for other reasons, I live in Idaho with good power and only a few % distortion on the AC. The arguments with cables are a lot like the arguments with AC power yes, if you have cheep cables any signal will sound different, if you have bad AC it will sound bad because your entire system with be out of the limits the transformer and rectifiers can handle, this is not what the normal audiophile dealing with comparing 1k$ cables and 5k$ power conditioning equipment. 

@jea48 
I had a panasonic 3700 but the one made for portable recording, I got into so much trouble with it because it could never hold sync, the way the time code and the sample rate were derived didn’t work. Back then 35 years ago there were a few different TC rates depending on what you needed to sync to if it was a film camera the Panasonic was useless. A few years later HHB and Fostex came out with DAT recorders that derived their sample rate from internal clocks and not dependent on sample rates. Panasonic recorders were never a standard in the film industry after the 3700. Yes the machine was really bad full of jitter and out of sync signals because it was a flawed machine in any test any scale and in every way.