I think what it all comes down to is this ; what is the difference between hearing a difference and imagining that you hear a difference? This is the essential problem with audiophiles.This accusation is tiring to listen to....Like the recurrent placebo effect...And generally decreed by people who have no clue about the way to go to with the embeddings of their audio system , except the totally insufficient rule : buy, plug, and use it....
In my experiments for the last couple of years creating spectacular homemade NO-COST solutions for my audio system, I encounter no placebo effect, and no hearing and imagined hearing alternatives, WHY?
Simply because a long CUMULATIVE series of positive small or bigger audible changes are NOT reducible to auditory illusion... WHY ?
Because they are incrementally and STEP BY STEP created by exploratory experiments, in the mechanical, electrical, and acoustical dimension fields of the audio system of my house....
In a word: a pill that make your heathier each weeks for years is NOT a placebo effect pills....Especially if someone else feel the same after eating it....The mechanical, electrical, and acoustical embedding dimensions are not illusory tweaking obsession of cranks, they are the 3 conditions necessary to gives to yourself the true potential S.Q. of any audio system....
For the directionality of cable, I only go with the advise of the cable seller....I had no opinion about that....