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Cable directionality

I'm sure this has been discussed before but I missed it, so what is all this stuff with the direction of voltage flow with cables? Every cable you see any more has a little arrow on it. Since the signal is AC and travels one direction as much as it travels the other, what difference could this possibly make. I have talked to numerous co-workers (all electrical engineers) and they ALL say this is the biggest bunch of bunk they have ever seen. Since I am the only "Audiophile", I try to keep an open mind(I'm also the odd man out being mechanical.) Skin effect, resistance, capacitance, etc. are true issues. You pass power through a wire and it creates a magnetic field. You do deal with impedence and synergy with the driving source. How about a few technical answers from the audiophile community.
bigtee

Showing 1 response by rcrump

rcrump
427 posts
 
Cable directionality is one of those things that is very easy to hear and very difficult to measure to the Hard Line Objectivists (HLO) satisfaction as the differences are buried in the noise and couldn't matter anyway....Ben Duncan heard the differences in wire directionality and developed a test for this that has been severly criticized by HLOs who say it was measurement error or it was far down as not to make any difference anyway....I use my ears and my cables all are set up for a proper stage and venue information which is in the diode effects in wire and likely 120dB down in the mix....It matters to me and is the reason I can pull more information out of cables that aren't much different than any on the market....Nothing mystical here, just care in putting together wires for the best presentation....It is a pain to listen to each spool of wire and document which end goes to source and which to load as respects each leg, but that is necessary for a proper presentation without hot spots in the stage, normally at the speakers, and proper image height....

Bob Crump
TG Audio/CTC Builders/DDR Mfg
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