Directionality Explained


I have read it argued against by those who think they know
Here is proof
Paul Speltz Founder of ANTICABLES shares his thoughts about wire directionality. Dear Fellow Audiophiles, As an electronic engineer, I struggled years ago with the idea of wire being directional because it did not fit into any of the electrical models I had learned. It simply did not make sense to me that an alternating music signal should favor a direction in a conductor. One of the great things about our audio hobby is that we are able to hear things well before we can explain them; and just because we can’t explain something, doesn't mean that it is not real. 

https://www.monoandstereo.com/2020/05/wire-directionality.html#more
tweak1
"You should always brush in a counter clockwise direction."
Looking from which side?

I thought correct way is up-down, not in circles. I learn here, I really do.
So, Just how do these companies "Stay Afloat" that manufacture the cables if it is actually, "Just a Marketing Scheme"?
 I mean, Pretty much "Most", if not "All" of the reputable companies offer at a minimum, (A "30" day, free  home trial), right? Or your money back "In full", don't they?
I haven't really looked at that in awhile. But I don't think that has really changed in any appreciable way has it?.....

But if they are..."Just Marketing Schemes". .How is it they are still in business? Because for the majority of people that I am aware of? Nearly all of those whom don't think that cabling makes a difference? Are the one's that are typically a member of a group of "four". Not always, but usually.
They are;
1.Those whom have never actually tried the cables that will make a difference. "The largest group of the four, By Far".
Or
 2. Those whom have a rig that has issues. Issues which preclude "anyone", from discerning much of anything. Let alone hearing a difference..... 
Or
3. Those whom have a home, "Stereo".As they usually call it.  And it is usually centered around a  "Receiver". A receiver that has not a chance of ever resolving a resolution of music, into and of a "quality", which, "Nearly anyone", could easily hear the differences of.
 "These guy's are the one's hardest to convince. As they seem not to understand the actual meaning of simple words. Words such as, "Cost", "Engineering", and of course-, "Science". They, "Think", as well as "Believe", that they understand these words. And therein lies the problem...
Or lastly, "And this one honestly saddens me" ......
4. Those whom simply have not the "ability", to hear the difference. "However that may have been caused". Sometimes they are as they are, from birth, sometimes not.
But currently there is nothing which can be done to remedy the situation.

So, Just for the good of this communities general health and wealth of  information;
Which is it? Of the, "One through four"?
Which is it for you fellows?
Do you have to continually buy new keyboards because you keep wearing out the "parentheses" button?
And please save some punctuation for the rest of us...
If something is not mathematically measurable, the result is very subjective and mostly snake oil. Since "depth", "image", "slam" and a lot of other audiophilic drivel cannot be measured, all claims should be taken with a ton of salt 😀 it is still mostly drivel.  
If you can’t hear depth, image, slam and a lot of other cues, then you have crappy hearing, or a crappy system and rely on the old fall back position of "if it can’t be measured....blah, blah, blah" to make up for it.

I still have lots of old cables and they all sound different to anyone with intact, functioning hearing abilities.

All the best,
Nonoise
It is really not that hard. "To measure a difference". What is hard to define is any, "particular", sound. But that, can be done though it may be exhausting. And that in, "your" rig,. We are talking about things that "you" need to at the very least, have the basic understanding of. Concepts that are available for you to learn. But "You", need to learn them. I cannot do that for you. And I do not believe any of these, "Concepts" are at all, "Rocket Science". Just a bit past basic physics really. 
And since I have never called you, "Grasshopper".....

If you wish I can tell you where to begin.
The rest is up to you.

Yet still, I shall not call you, "Grasshopper".
"Weedhopper", possibly.....


Once they’ve gotten a foothold in your thread they can be very difficult to get rid of. Did someone forget to put out the Roach Motels last night? I won’t mention any names but this is their glubson stock in trade. And there is usually only one direction the thread can glubson and his dumbass Brer Fox and Tar Baby routine head. 
Breaking 🐃🐃🐃!
The only direction this thread is headed is in a circle. Just like every single thread on directionality. It’s a universal constant, like gravity, the speed of light, and jollygreen’s horrendous lack of punctuation skills.

But, it’s a gorgeous Sunday morning, the SpaceX launch was a success (which in fact IS rocket science🚀), and I’m enjoying the heck out of watching an oriole eating grape jelly for breakfast. They seem to prefer the Welch’s sans high fructose corn syrup. As do I. It’s grapier.
So, don’t be a ⬛, rube. Go 🐒!!






No, I don’t watch much television...📺
Although, I did recently channel 'Ozark' on Netflix. Good stuff!
Glubson! What did you do with carpathian? I’d recognize that lamo response anywhere.
geoffkait,

Better question is what happened to you last night. Why are you so negatively-charged this morning and without any wit?

Speaking of directionality, I do believe in cable directionality. They always go from what is connected to what it is connected to. Or the other way around, depending on what side I decide to look at first.

Now, why not some fuse directionality enlightenment sprinkled with a little bit of analog vs. digital? Light one, just for sunday morning. Before your bike ride.
"I’m enjoying the heck out of watching an oriole eating grape jelly for breakfast."


🥳⌚🍪🐦🍴🍇🕓💔⏩
Post removed 
"Do all ICs sound alike? Do all speaker cables sound alike?"
Can there be a waiver for the number tested? There must be hudreds and hindreds of combinations. Not practical.
Some IC and  speaker cables are specifically made to have a sound like a tone control. I would say all IC and speaker cable that measure very close would sound the same. 
I guess you could say imagination playing tricks, or our biases confirming what we believe. I have a bias that cables that measure similar sound the same. In a sighted test even if the cables have been altered to obviously sound different I would think they sound the same in an unsighted test I might be able to hear differences. It's just the way humans are wired,  all of us.
As much as I like some of you and really and truly appreciate your insights on most things audio, I must say you've got to stop implying that those who hear a difference are, to put it simply, insane.

No matter how your sugar coat or frame it, it sounds like a last ditch attempt when you've run out of excuses that don't hold up.

How in the hell can two differently made cables sound the same? How can two different recipes for you favorite dish taste the same? 

You seem to be stuck on the concept that we're at the apex of our ability to measure everything, which is pure hubris. Any well made cable will measure differently from another. Just look at the specs for L, C and R, which many are so fond of referring to. Compare them for yourselves and you'll see they vary. Sometimes, a lot.

Yet, they all run within the range of what is considered acceptable but they sure as hell don't sound the same. It's right about here and now when it'll be said that the differences are too small to make a difference and that's where you part company with the reality you've woven, completing a circle.

All the best,
Nonoise


I could understand the doubters and take them seriously- in 1980. There was no internet, Stereo Review was pretty much it, and Julian Hirsch was the Oracle of all things audio. Stereo Review and Julian Hirsch said if it measures the same it sounds the same. Wire is wire, and that was that.

Even then though J. Gordon Holt had already started the movement that was to become Stereophile. JGH took the opposing view that our listening experience is what counts. Its nice if you can measure it but if you can’t that’s your problem not ours.

Stereo Review and the measurers owned the market back then. The market gave us amplifier wars, as manufacturers competed for ever more power with ever lower distortion. Until one day "measures great sounds bad" became a thing.

Could be a few here besides me lived through and remember this. If you are reading and if you were reading JGH back then I tip my hat to you, sir! I fell prey to Hirsch and his siren song that you can have it all for cheap and don’t really have to learn to listen.

But anyway like I was saying it was easy to believe the lie back then because it was so prevalent and also because what wire there was that sounded better didn’t really sound a whole lot better.

Now though even budget wire sounds so much better than what comes off a reel you’d have to be deaf not to notice. Really good wires sound so good you’d notice even if you ARE deaf! No kidding. My aunt Bessie was deaf as a stone but she could FEEL the sound at a high enough volume and recognize it as music. So literally deaf from birth aunt Bessie can hear better than some audiophiles.

Oh and not done beating the horse quite yet, according to my calendar its 2020, a solid 40 years past 1980. Stereo Review is dead and buried. Stereophile lives on. A whole industry built on wire not being wire thrives. Maybe the measurement people can chalk up from that just how many years, billions, they are in denial.
djones51
I guess you could say imagination playing tricks, or our biases confirming what we believe. I have a bias that cables that measure similar sound the same. In a sighted test even if the cables have been altered to obviously sound different I would think they sound the same in an unsighted test I might be able to hear differences. It’s just the way humans are wired, all of us.

>>>>Huh? Humans aren’t wired like that at all. Perhaps best to leave the psychological issues to the professionals. Woulda, shoulda, coulda! 🤗
@ glupson and djones51,

You can’t have it both ways..... You guys can’t require measurements to prove what some people say they hear from cables, and then turn around and use your opinions and theories why all cables don’t sound the same.

Not everything can be measured with testing equipment that exists today. So why don’t Cable companies invest money to invent the test equipment to prove to the minority of those that demand only testing can prove ICs and speaker cables don’t all sound the same? Or why Solid core wire ICs and speaker cables are directional? Because they don’t need to. The vast majority of buyers of their products know what they hear and really could care less the why. That’s also why the vast majority of people that can hear the differences don’t post on threads like this one. These type of threads always end up the same way.

John Curl said in an interview, (I’m paraphrasing), the ears are the best instrument for testing how something sounds. He said test equipment is used to try and figure out why something doesn’t sound right to the ears. Trust your ears, not test equipment. You know what the final piece of test equipment Audio Research Corp. uses to test their equipment before it goes out the door? The Warren test equipment. If it doesn’t pass the Warren test it goes back on the bench for testing to find out why it doesn’t sound right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5HNiAgWMuU


.
If no one knows the reason why cables may sound different in a given direction, how can you invent test equipment for something you don’t know how or what to measure??
jea48,

"You guys can’t require measurements to prove what some people say they hear from cables, and then turn around and use your opinions and theories why all cables don’t sound the same."

I was merely noticing that your questions...

"Do all ICs sound alike? Do all speaker cables sound alike?"

are a bit detached from practical reality.

Get all the cables in the world and check them. Prove they are different. Once you do, someone will bring another one and claim you did not check them all. And be right.
"If it doesn’t pass the Warren test it goes back on the bench for testing to find out why it doesn’t sound right."
That is a good quality control ad, but not much of an ad. If they are not sure they can consistently put a few electronic parts together, we have a problem.
Here’s the actual John Curl quote for my post above.


Page 15/18
Also, we couldn’t use mylar capacitors, which are fairly efficient coupling capacitors. While mylars are fairly efficient from a size and cost point of view, we realized they have problems with dielectric absorption. I didn’t believe it at first. I was working with Noel Lee and a company called Symmetry. We designed this crossover and I specified these one microfarad Mylar caps. Noel kept saying he could ’hear the caps’ and I thought he was crazy. Its performance was better than aluminum or tantalum electrolytics, and I couldn’t measure anything wrong with my Sound Technology distortion analyzer. So what was I to complain about? Finally I stopped measuring and started listening, and I realized that the capacitor did have a fundamental flaw. This is were the ear has it all over test equipment. The test equipment is almost always brought on line

Page 16/18
to actually measure problems the ear hears. So we’re always working in reverse. If we do hear something and we can’t measure it then we try to find ways to measure what we hear. In the end we invariably find a measurement that matches what the ear hears and it becomes very obvious to everybody.

Years ago, there was a time when people used to think you could have a two- or four-foot path difference between loudspeaker components; like the Klipschorn, for example. Everyone said this time difference was inaudible, and it didn’t really matter because Bell Labs’ research, Ohm’s law of acoustics, Helmholtz and all these other people believed that the ear was completely insensitive to phase. So it didn’t matter how you built the speaker as long as it sort of averaged out sort of okay in the room. You could take five microphones and measure them all together, if that measured out okay within a few DB’s then heck with it. Well, that really isn’t true and of course when stereo came along all of a sudden you had these big Klipschorns and they wouldn’t image for anything. At least that was my personal experience. I owned them and I was a believer too. Then I started measuring them and I said ’oh my goodness, this is a problem.’ The late Richard Heyser tried to tell people that a two foot path difference might be audible. People were going crazy and saying this was impossible and it was a big controversy. Now, of course, no fool would design a speaker with a two- or four-foot path difference. John Dunlavy was very outspoken on the Internet this week, criticizing a loudspeaker that wasn’t completely phase aligned to within one inch. See how we change. I don’t disagree with John Dunlavy, although I do think he is overstating his case in this particular one. But, there was a time when we didn’t. The same thing happens with capacitors. There was a time when we didn’t know better and we just used any old capacitor as long as it had the right values.
https://parasound.com/pdfs/JCinterview.pdf


"The test equipment is almost always brought on line to actually measure problems the ear hears. So we’re always working in reverse. If we do hear something and we can’t measure it then we try to find ways to measure what we hear. In the end we invariably find a measurement that matches what the ear hears and it becomes very obvious to everybody. "

Yeah, it was obvious to everybody! Once they found a way to measure it.....

.
"In the end we invariably find a measurement that matches what the ear hears and it becomes very obvious to everybody. "
Have they found the measurement that matched what it is about wire directionality, yet? Is that already invariable or it is still in the works?
You don’t have to wait until you measure. You just have to hear it. Or in the case of John Curl wait until someone else hears it. 🤗 Besides no one has figured out how to measure warmth, air, transparency, soundstage or presence. We’re waiting for NASA or MIT.
Post removed 
I wouldn't be holding my breath on NASA. Didn't they just come out with: "We just learned that our atmosphere extends far beyond the Moon???
"Besides no one has figured out how to measure warmth, air, transparency, soundstage or presence."
So it is not invariably as quote in one of above posts said. Lots of sweet talk, not many examples. Now, how do you measure sweet talk? Simple. It is about wires.
I wouldn't be holding my breath on NASA......"We just learned that our atmosphere extends far beyond the Moon???
You do not need to hold your breath. Atmosphere extends far beyond...

>>>>Huh? Humans aren’t wired like that at all. Perhaps best to leave the psychological issues to the professionals

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/09/cognitive-bias/565775/
https://www.zmescience.com/science/cognitive-biases-list


James Johnston 
Acoustics, Psychoacoustics, Hearing - Architectural Acoustics

A view of perception Lateral inhibition Frequency filtering, loudness analysis Object Analysis Feature Analysis Cognitive-level understanding Peripheral Processing Megabits Many Megabits Kilobits Bits OBSERVE THE MASSIVE FEEDBACK AND THE LOSS OF DATA AT EACH STEP

How does this cause conflict? First, it clearly shows the need for “blind testing” in fact “double-blind testing”. – No, that doesn’t mean you wear a blindfold – It does mean that you have to detect the differences you’re listening for WITHOUT HINTS FROM OTHER SENSES No, you can’t ignore them. It’s not delusion, hallucination, or stupidity, it’s how your brain works. If it’s not a DBT, you have no idea what you were responding to, beyond “something.”

As the Chef says..We eat with our eyes. 
We also can hear with our eyes, it's how we're hard wired ...at least according to the professionals so I agree let's leave it to them.
Professional bozos, you mean. 🤡 🤡 🤡 You wouldn’t have to look very hard to find some bozo somewhere who agrees with you.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? 😬

If thy Eye 👁 offend thee pluck it out.

Metaphors be with you!
If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? 😬
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p93w7MpbZRw
A favorite movie of mine.

All the best,
Nonoise


This thread is going well.  By the way, Biden and Trump are close to their 80's, so this country is probably for old men.  
It's hard to change your ways when it's been working all this time, but change, it will. We are living in interesting times, I dare say. It's surreal watching events unfold in gigantic, historical ways.

Something to tell the grand kids about.

All the best,
Nonoise