Directional speaker cables - switching direction

Using cables attached in the wrong direction opens the door to chaos...once on that path you could be doomed...is it worth it? NO NO NO...However, one thing you can try is to erase the little arrows and anything saying "speaker" or "amp" on the cables, shuffle the cables around blindly, and plug 'em in. Stand back and duck for cover as the entire neighborhood could explode in one of those zombie-esque nightmare scenarios...good luck.

I truly envy those who have enough time in their lives to sit and critically listen to their cables and then swap the direction and do it again. And to ensure they heard what they think they heard, do it all again over and over.

While I'm a big believer in cabling, I'm a bigger believer in cable settling, which can take a long time regardless of the directionality of the wire.

If you haven't used the wire for a couple of years, you will be essentially settling a new cable and should be able to hook it up in any direction and still need a few hundred hours of constant signal being passed through it to fully stabilize the cable.

If you find this a little too much to swallow then I sure as heck wouldn't worry about directionality as it's far less significant than cable settling.

Timrhu wrote,

"I truly envy those who have enough time in their lives to sit and critically listen to their cables and then swap the direction and do it again. And to ensure they heard what they think they heard, do it all again over and over."

What's it take, about 60 seconds? Now, compare that to 30 years of slaving on the system trying to get it sound good.

When I started this thread I inadvertently pressed the "submit now" button before I completed my thought so I'll try to finish it now with the added benefit of these comments. Although I'm skeptical of the theory of directionality in a conductor, even for DC current, I'll discuss it as if I accept the idea. By no stretch do I mean to be critical of those who argue the validity of cable directionality but I think sometimes we go so far into the quest that we start to invent things that we feel are standing in the way of perfection. Because the Straightwire cables were removed from my system before I noticed the arrows, I have no idea if they had been installed properly. Whether or not they had been, though, if there is validity to the directionality theory there is also the question of break-in direction and how permanent that would be in the event that I would try to reuse them. BTW, I like the idea of avoiding Zombies and appreciate the warning.

Because I'm not secure in my conclusion that the direction issue is an imaginary one, I'm going to reinstall a pair of Silver Sonic cables that I had used in another setup in the past. These have no arrows imprinted on them and I know which direction the break-in occurred because there are spades on one end and bananas on the other and have thousands of hours on them. If the "settling in" process will be starting over, that's OK; these new speakers will take awhile also.

All of this is coming up because I just changed speakers from the Martin Logan Odysseys to ML Ethos. My system otherwise is Shanling CD 100 and Peachtree Audio Nova as preamp and Peachtree 220 amp.