So you think wire conductors in cables are directional? Think again...

Scientific discussion will not dissuade the "true believers" from their beliefs about qualities they attribute to wire.

Cable companies use clever advertising to prey upon the gullible and insecure to gain marketing advantage!

People with vested interests (manufacturers and customers) have a stake in maintaining their claims that cable A is sonically "better" than cable B - without the validity of proper A/B tests. Like religion their beliefs/claims are entirely fsith-based.

WRT  https://www.nordost.com/faqs-directionality.php

This particular example has nothing to do with directionality - the cable utilizes a floating shield and the end where the shield is connected should be plugged into to a "grounded" component.

Nordost are wrong to use an arrow because they have no idea which component in your system is grounded

In my system 

• my phono stage IS grounded at the mains
• my Node 2i IS NOT grounded at the mains

So connecting these cables to those two components would have the arrows pointing in opposite directions.

Personally, I have not observed differences in direction of cables when trying this with a new interconnects

But I have observed differences when reversing an IC that has been "broken in" and then reversed.

• does this mean the wire is directional?
• or is it the impact of reseating the connectors?
• the IC resumes its previous characteristics after a couple of days - "reseating"

For me the verdict is still out, but this particular "example" simply demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge on the part of those debating the topic in the "Physics" forum

Sorry - just another opinion

BLA BLA BLA Broken F***in record.. How may times were you clowns set in the corner for NOT LISTENING.

You site some half baked crap from WHO? "Someone that says"

No one claims anything. The claims are from the flat earthers how "OTHER" people, (NOT THEM) CAN’T hear what THEY hear.

Why not say "I can’t hear the difference", "Others MAY".

Ignorance is bliss, so is a limited ability to discern the difference in cables, gear, acoustics and God forbid a TWEAK that works..

Your THREAD is here to do one thing collect fungus, at least that has a purpose, the little conversation you referred to is as old as DIRT..

LEARN to listen for yourself AND QUIT speaking for others.

Hearing aids... One Mouth shut. Two ears OPEN. Try it...

Ahh edgewound, the newest genius has arisen from the dust of the last. Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust..

Back on your meds again I see..

I suppose we’ll all get a good shellacking about, engineer this and engineer that.

Good Lord little johnny come lately. Catch up and quit making a FOOL out of yourself for the umpteenth time.

Manic again are we... STAY on your meds, stay off the BOOZE!!!

Just an observation from the LAST 10 times you pulled your Anarchy CRAP!!!! GD Troll and your buddies..

How many personalities do you have? Really you gotta stay ON the meds...

You’re becoming a kenjit (nuisance for short).

Master M, he's back....:-)

Why are you posting on a site you called antiquated?

oldhvmec: your posts are getting real tiresome!

your posts are getting real tiresome!

Your posts were tiresome when you were roberjerman and they are still tiresome now. 

Edgewound just couldn't resist.

DeKay

Ohhh. Raw nerves exposed of the anti-reality bunch. 

As i believe that people can be more civilized, I have a suggestion for the ones who deny all, the mischievous, the theoretical experience gurus and all those who just want to call themselves crusaders. Create a thread where you can praise each other of how sensible and clever you are. We are not going to iterfere there or try to convince you by any means.
So why don't you leave the rest of the empirical ones to suffer in their hobby?
i believe it is a vey fair suggestion.
Not accepting counteroffers.

If ignorance is bliss, those unfamiliar with the nature of science must be experiencing Nirvana. They simply CAN’T grasp, there there exists more than one THEORY, concerning electricity and that THEORIES don’t prove anything. Try a little update there, at least to the 20th Century’s science, Sparky!                                                                           ie: https://www.quora.com/Are-photons-involved-in-all-forms-of-electricity-for-example-when-it-flows-thr...    and:  https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2348                                                                                                                                                   You can argue, whine and moan amongst yourselves, as I find your incessant/willful ignorance tedious and a waste of keystrokes.

I follow the arrows on my expensive cable.
When I don't, the music/vocal tracks are heard in esrever!

As stated in article read years ago- "directional arrows are put on our cables because the consumer demands them"

If someone can "hear" a difference with "directional" cable and you can't it means....they can hear a difference.

Something for the offensive and illiterate one at the top of this S-Show of a thread idea...to try and wrap his puny & purposely antagonizing troll based mind around.
But I doubt he will.

Q: What did the edgewound resistor say to the capacitor?

A: Watt’s up.

DeKay

Create a thread where you can praise each other of how sensible and clever you are. We are not going to iterfere there or try to convince you by any means

.
It's already been done. It's the link the OP provided.

All the best,
Nonoise

rodman999994,979 posts05-13-2021 9:09amIf ignorance is bliss, those unfamiliar with the nature of science must be experiencing Nirvana. They simply CAN’T grasp, there there exists more than one THEORY, concerning electricity and that THEORIES don’t prove anything. Try a little update there, at least to the 20th Century’s science, Sparky!                                                                           ie: https://www.quora.com/Are-photons-involved-in-all-forms-of-electricity-for-example-when-it-flows-thr...    and:  https://van.physics.illinois.edu/qa/listing.php?id=2348                                                                                                                                                   You can argue, whine and moan amongst yourselves, as I find your incessant/willful ignorance tedious and a waste of keystrokes.

You have gone totally off the rails thinking that any of this has to do with analog audio frequencies in a wire. It doesn't. 

dekay3,644 posts05-13-2021 9:55amQ: What did the edgewound resistor say to the capacitor?

A: Watt’s up.

DeKay

🤣Sounds like current events. VI=P

your posts are getting real tiresome!

Your posts were tiresome when you were roberjerman and they are still tiresome now.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

AND the rest of the names IT post under. Robertdidit, audio2design, d2tech, how many more times, how many more names?

"REAL TIRESOME!", I’m the OLD mechanic, I will fix this problem, you can count on it...I’ll fix the problem OR THROW away the PART..

Smarten up Craphead52 you have ZERO positive to offer

Anarchist, plain an simple pedal you dissension else where.

By YOUR ways you are known.. They wrote about people like you 3500 years ago.

How ya doing rodmann99999? Been a while.. Cary's still cooking along?

Let us just say for the sake of argument that you take a look down the street and the car parked a mile away seems to be moving around. Some people look and say no it is so far away I can hardly even tell it is a car. Others look and say not only is it moving around but it is changing shape as I look at it.   

You cannot settle this argument so you enlist a physicist. The physicist explains in no uncertain terms the bonds in metal make it far too rigid to possibly be changing shape. The mass of the car and gravity mean it cannot ever just rise and float above the road. It is impossible. You are imagining. It is all in your head. Someone is selling you snake oil. 

Until a physicist specializing in atmospheric research comes along and says well look, this is all perfectly understandable. The sun heats the road, the warm air rises in currents. Warm air is less dense and so light passing through it is refracted, bent. This perfectly explains what you are seeing.  

The people with poor eyesight, they still see only an unmoving blob where others with sharper vision see clearly a car moving with the heat waves.  

Science does not exist to prove or disprove human experience. Science is nothing more than a method that is has been proven to be the most reliable one for eventually figuring out how the world works.

Please do try and keep these different ideas separate and clear in your mind. If you can just manage to do this one thing it will be amazing how much more clear your understanding of so many things will become over time. Not now, maybe not tomorrow, but gradually over time.

Burp

Crap I am in trouble, MC is making sense.. LOL

What he said..

That's a New Zealand term, for "What he Said"

Of course it was 45 years ago..

Heat in the desert, I've seen some pretty wild looking sunsets and sunrises for that matter..

millercarbon9,143 posts05-13-2021 10:33amLet us just say for the sake of argument that you take a look down the street and the car parked a mile away seems to be moving around. Some people look and say no it is so far away I can hardly even tell it is a car. Others look and say not only is it moving around but it is changing shape as I look at it.

You cannot settle this argument so you enlist a physicist. The physicist explains in no uncertain terms the bonds in metal make it far too rigid to possibly be changing shape. The mass of the car and gravity mean it cannot ever just rise and float above the road. It is impossible. You are imagining. It is all in your head. Someone is selling you snake oil.

Until a physicist specializing in atmospheric research comes along and says well look, this is all perfectly understandable. The sun heats the road, the warm air rises in currents. Warm air is less dense and so light passing through it is refracted, bent. This perfectly explains what you are seeing.

This has zero to do with electric current at audio frequencies in a wire. But...it’s typical of overhyped, theoretical fantasies of mind theater interconnects. How does it look to a blind person?

Your analogy is completely irrelevant. Not surprising...at all.

Engineering wise, conductor signal direction makes no sense, especially since we are talking about AC signals that change directions anyway.

However, before anyone says no.  (Which I will quickly as an Electronics/Electrical Engineer), the real test is to hook it up to a signal analyzer, and see if there is a difference.  Then, play a song with the cable in question.  Then reverse the cable and place the same song changing absolutely nothing else.

Blind is better.  If the people in the room and yourself for that matter hear differences, well, there you are.

For Engineers this is a non issue as it doesn't impact what they are designing and using cables for in the first place.  For Audiophiles on the other hand, it is more perceived.

Science is not about perception, it is about repeatable environment and test, to repeat something under the same situation/circumstances/environment.  It is isn't repeatable, it isn't science.  it's magic.

But, I won't say no. I will say, show me.

enjoy

If someone does not hear the direction of the wires, then either he is deaf or the system has a very low resolution.

The fact that engineers and scientists do not know how to measure it is the problem of imperfect models and measuring instruments. Any scientific or even more so engineering model is not ultimately true.

Why is it the direction an AC wire is installed only seems to affect audio systems? You never see people complaining about their refrigerator boiling eggs or stove freezing pizza with backwards wires.

From Chord!
Almost all speaker cables, in fact almost all audio cables, be they for digital or analogue are, in our experience, directional in that the sound will be better with the cable connected in a specific direction. Chord speaker cables should be connected so that the print on the cable reads in the direction of the signal.

yogiboy3,973 posts05-13-2021 1:09pmFrom Chord!
Almost all speaker cables, in fact almost all audio cables, be they for digital or analogue are, in our experience, directional in that the sound will be better with the cable connected in a specific direction. Chord speaker cables should be connected so that the print on the cable reads in the direction of the signal.

Especially if the cable is outfitted with male and female connectors at each end. Low impedance mic cables and balanced interconnects come to mind...because that is required to actually connect the cables. For unbalanced coaxial style cables grounded at each end, with the same type of connector at each end, the direction does not matter. Speaker cables terminated with different connectors at each end are obviously directional as to how it's connected. Bare wire...does not matter. 

Science does not exist to prove or disprove human experience. Science is nothing more than a method that is has been proven to be the most reliable one for eventually figuring out how the world works.

Please do try and keep these different ideas separate and clear in your mind. If you can just manage to do this one thing it will be amazing how much more clear your understanding of so many things will become over time. Not now, maybe not tomorrow, but gradually over time.

@millercarbon

Welcome to your Grand Delusion.

Q:  What did the capacitor say to the resistor?

A:  You just caused me to discharge.

"A Colt 45 and Two Zig Zags - baby".

DeKay

djones,
Has your side of the aisle ever asked you to stop helping them? In your entire life have you ever produced an applicable analogy?

Kind of funny the RF folks now are criticizing about cable directional.  RF folks are known for their measurements so they have to live and die by it.
If you insist on measurement, you got to put up or shut up.

In RF, there is something called "insertion loss" or RF people would call it "SD21" or "SD12".  SD21 is the insertion loss in one direction whereas SD12 is insertion loss in the other direction.  And these are never the same especially in RF.  You measure insertion loss in one direction, then the other direction, and the results are close but never the same.

Also if RF folks also are making fun of cable lifters, remember that RF cables are very sensitive to the cable bending.  If you bend the cable just slightly, your SD21 will change.  Expensive RF cables are less sensitive but they all are.  

You see, there a lot of these voodoo scientists ... errr... I meant "objectivist".  They keep pounding on the word "measurements", but they themselves can't withstand close scrutiny.  A lot of these people are using the word "measurement" as a mean to an agenda but a lot of them don't know what they are talking about.

There used to be a working link I've used in past discussions on cable directionality and it's not coming up anymore.
(http://www.tubemastering.com/philtaylor.pdf )It had to do with Pink Floyd and the building of a studio on the Astoria (David Gilmore's house boat), a boat they used to record on. In between sessions, they swapped cable directions and easily heard the differences, preferring one way over the other.

The best I can do right now was to find an article that doesn't go into it in such depth but speaks to the differences in cabling that can be heard. 
https://www.soundonsound.com/people/recording-david-gilmours-island
Scroll down to the "Grounding on Water" section in grey.

There's also this from Tony Farinella who makes the cables that David Gilmore uses: http://sparebricks.fika.org/sbzine28/ggg.html
There is a section where he discusses cable directionality.

Let's see... another non working link to TapeOp about the house boat and cable directionality....can't find anything else for the moment.

All the best,
Nonoise

Andy2:

What/who are RF Folks?

I can only think of "radio frequency" off the top of my head.

DeKay

Drive your car to work, then drive back. Your mpg is not the same both way because one way will have more uphill or downhill vs. the other way.

Same for electrons. They will expend different amount of energy differently directionally because the metal structure is not uniform.

At least that is the theory, but as far as if you could hear a difference, I don't know.  My old age hearing probably not good enough.

😀😂😂. Let’s just say this is a failed attempt to analogy 

djones513,973 posts05-13-2021 3:30pmWhy is it the direction an AC wire is installed only seems to affect audio systems? You never see people complaining about their refrigerator boiling eggs or stove freezing pizza with backwards wires.

Here is a riddle for you guys.

Let's say you have a track from point A - to - B.  This track is not symmetric but have obstacles, uphill, down hill but everything is non-uniform.  May have more uphill or downhill depends on direction.

Case 1: You run from A to B then back to A.
Case 2: You run from B to A then back to B.

Will you expend the same amount of energy in both cases?

Ah, with a little bit of sleuthing, I found the article from the failed link where one of the engineers for Pink Floyd talks of how they built the recording studio on the Astoria. About 2/3 of the way down he goes into detail on how cables sound different one way over the other and that one is a better sounding way:
https://www.davidgilmour.com/press/2005/march/TapeOp_March05.pdf

But hey, he's only a recording engineer working with Pink Floyd so what do they know?

All the best,
Nonoise

In all seriousness, to the OP: who cares. 
Step One: cables arrive

Step two: if they have arrows, place them according to arrows

Step three: done

Why is this so tough??

Unless of course you buy stupid shit Christmas “wire” from Home Depot, and are wondering why they don’t have any arrows on them. 
Which begs the question: why do YOU even have to worry about the directionally of the cable?

If wire had directionality to audio signals somebody would already have invented a device to measure and quantify it! So where's this device? 

Engineering wise, conductor signal direction makes no sense, especially since we are talking about AC signals that change directions anyway.


Doesn't the electromagnetic wave propagate away from the source?

All we get so far are the wise sages listening to their wires and acting like the four blind men and an elephant! 

That's rich coming from a guy who's avatar looks like he should walking with a seeing eye dog.

nonoise7,023 posts05-13-2021 4:51pmThat's rich coming from a guy who's avatar looks like he should walking with a seeing eye dog.

...and I bet Stevie Wonder can hear better than you.

No.

Also, these things are measurable by science.

It is just not worth it (Read cost effective) to spend considerable time and expense on cable directional issues for audio signals. For power transmission or distribution circuits from power systems, then cable science makes sense to pursue. in order to keep high voltage  transmission line losses low.

also, for audio or power cord cables, it comes down to:
1.  Impedance
2.  Capacitance (included in impedance) loading
3.  inductance loading (included in impedance)
4.  Resistance (included in impedance)
5.  Skin effect (maybe)
6.  voltage capability
7.  Current capability
8.  Costs to design/construct

Unless there is serious scientific reason why, (or serious money involved),Engineers will not be concerned with low level cable signal direction.

enjoy

The reason that some manufacturers put the arrow on the wire is because they made the wire and know which way the copper was drawn through the dies when it was manufactured the other manufacturers listen for best sound but i can understand how the sound would be better in the direction the copper was drawn out it is the best explanation i have ever heard about this.