Directional wires/cables

Not to start a war here, but it is physics not sentienticy, and grain configuration/stresses in the metal do affect electron flow

@jeffbij Not to continue the war, but while the existence of crystalline grains affecting electron flow may have a base in physics, it still does not support the idea of cables being directional. A musical signal alternates - potentially imperfectly at times, and an AC current (power) alternates rather perfectly, even if potentially distorted from a pure sine wave. Also, note that what is typically called ’electrical current’ is not the motion of electrons, but the variation in electromagnetic field, which is not the same thing at all (see e.g. Veritasium’s video on electricity).

I’ll accept that asymmetrically terminated cables (e.g. with shielding connected at one end only) may transmit signal differently if plugged in A --> B vs. B --> A, however I would also point out that it’s not ’the material in the cable’ being directional as such, but the effectiveness of the shielding in two different points of the EM field.

This said, if people believe that they hear differences, I’m not getting in their way.

@rodman99999

As simple a device as a fuse is: it still carries a sinusoidal signal/voltage, ALWAYS from source to load. NOT back and forth!

Also (as mentioned above): any fuse acts as an RLC circuit, the ’C’ of which will be determined by properties of its wave guide’s/conductor’s surroundings (ie: glass, air, bee’s wax, ceramic, end cap materials, etc).

Any commonly drawn wire will exhibit a chevron pattern in its crystal lattice, so: why not "directionality" and why Ohno Continuous Cast, single crystal wire sounds better, to so many?

Stated above are scientifically tested, measured and proven facts.

1) Your first statement above is completely incorrect. A fuse (to take your example) does not carry a voltage (whatever that means, since it is a meaningless statement in the first place). The idea of ’source’ and ’load’ are irrelevant in electrical theory; you can represent any part of a (linear-ized) circuit as a ’source’ with an ’impedance’ that is connected to the rest of the circuit ("load"). The fact that we as humans interested in hearing sound being reproduced interpret one component as a source and another as a load has nothing to do with the way in which electrical circuits behave.

2) All the parameters of an RLC representation of a real component will be influenced by the properties of the materials they are made and surrounded by. Not just capacitance.

3) The fact that a drawn wire will show a grain orientation does not imply your (or anybody else’s) opinion that there is any "directionality" or asymmetry in the way in which a non-DC waveform is transmitted through it.

4) Your "stated above" is not fact; it’s a mixture of poorly understood electrical theory/physics, and opinions. As is your idea that because materials with a high dielectric constant take longer to polarise therefore this justifies the phenomenon of burn-in.

5) Very little of what you have posted has anything to do with the topic of this thread, which is about the directionality of cables to audio signals.

Before continuing, kindly get a degree in electrical engineering (which I happen to have), rather than posting nonsense under the flag of "it’s new theory". No, it isn’t. The idea that electrical currents move as ping-pong balls in a tube is not based on "old theories"; it’s a (bad) analogy used today with high school students who start learning about electricity without having the mathematical background to understand different and more correct/complete representations. It’s neither more nor less than second grade students being told "you cannot do 2 minus 3" as they have not been introduced to negative numbers.

@billpete 

What about ones that do not have directionality in mind? Will they "learn" to be better in one direction than the other? This would mean that they physically changed over time.

No, they won't - there is no "direction" to an AC signal that would change the material to conduct preferentially in one sense rather than the other - and if there were, it would be a cause of significant distortion. Either the cable is manufactured asymmetrically (with different shielding or cable geometry) or it isn't - the asymmetry may cause differences in sound when the cable is plugged in one way rather than the other, but the asymmetry would not change because a signal is sent (from a human "teleological" perspective) from A to B instead of from B to A.

@rodman99999

PERHAPS: that’s changed in recent years and I missed it

Yes, that’s changed in "recent years" (very much in quotes). I graduated in 1990, I have kept myself professionally up-to-date since (unlike you, clearly), and none of the stuff from the late 19th century that you keep thinking is what people are taught, because you were taught it, is current now. My children, who are going through university now, are not taught that, and real images of atoms (electron clouds) are commonplace since the early 2000s. Wake up and smell the roses - you are out of date and out of order.

Inescapable FACT: No one understands exactly how electricity works. That’s why there’s so much Electrical THEORY.

Inescapable fact: we understand pretty well how electricity works, otherwise we would not be having this conversation on devices that use electricity on scales that range from quantum effects to human scale observables. None of the unresolved conflicts between GR and QM is applicable to computers or audio equipment. The story you keep telling yourself that ’nobody understands electricity’ is completely false - and funnily enough, it was Feynman that with QED (Nobel in 1965) added the last pieces to the puzzle. You quote, but you don’t read or understand.

Quiet snort of derision

Very loud laugh from me. Keep digging.

Incidentally - nobody here is saying that different cables do not sound different, or that asymmetrically constructed cables do not exhibit directionality in terms of their susceptibility to noise. Neither of those two observations requires any of the woo-woo that you are spouting about the lack of understanding of electricity (or your incorrect use of the word 'theory' in a scientific context; it doesn't mean what you think it means. A dictionary would be of help - as would a guide to typing. Multiple spaces to align text went out of fashion with typewriters, circa 1985).

@retiredaudioguy 

FYI.  In 1965 I got a 1st class honors degree (summa cum laude) in Mathematics, with Physics as a minor.

My dad was a physicist (and a fellow of the Institute of Physics) and my elder brother taught high school students who were going to read physics at University.

Just saying ...

Yep. And you aren't saying anything that is out of kilter with a "moderately up-to-date" understanding of electromagnetism, unlike others on this thread. 😉

The cargo cultist is still posting - that is you, @rodman99999

At that moment he realized: if he tried to explain what he was learning, there was no way his dad could understand.

This seems to be the situation indeed. You keep posting things that you don’t understand, and no matter how much I or others try to explain to you that things aren’t how you think they are, you simply cannot understand.#

This Dunning-Kruger exemplar

That would be you, again. Ad hominem does not make you smarter or even seem smarter.

Please - inform yourself before digging yourself further into the solid rock that you have reached 5 posts ago. I will no longer reply to your nonsense posts, here or anywhere else on this forum. Take care.

@thecarpathian Thanks for the info. I'm glad to know I'm not the only victim of random ramblings. 😉

Best wishes! 

@jea48 Honestly, one of the best and easiest-to-follow physics-level (rather than engineering-level) explanation of how an electric signal travels through a cable is the one by Veritasium that I linked above. Here it is again.

Derek discusses the case of a very simple circuit (a battery, a switch and a ’load’ which could be a lightbulb), but it’s easy to see how the exact same physical mechanisms are acting on a complex, variable signal (’music’), and why lumped element models are used to simplify the representation... to the point where they can over-simplify it!

To keep things more or less on topic (directionality of cables), to my mind this also shows why - in the absence of asymmetries in cable construction - the argument for cable directionality with quasi-periodic, alternating signals is a very hard one to support scientifically.

Do you even understand what response to impulse is, or how this is relevant to any and all signals? Very clearly not. Kindly stop posting things that do not have any connection to physics, history or reality, but only to your totally incorrect understanding of them.