Directionality of wire

"Not everything can be measured"


Exactly. Whatever experience that can be measured repeatedly and independently becomes accepted verifiable fact. What cannot or has not been successfully measured repeatedly and independently is in the realm of conjecture or hypothesis or "marketing hype" or "unsubstantiated claims".

There is a big difference in how much credibility one should really give to conjecture especially wild claims that are not easily verified.

For example, "man-made global warming" is conjecture and a hypothesis that is currently impossible to verify - we don’t know what component is natural variation and what might be man-made - we do know that natural variation can be colossal compared to what is conjectured that man might cause - so the theory has NOT been proven a fact although it is a surprisingly widely held belief. Quite a lot of widely held beliefs fit this category and it is often hard to distinguish fact from conjecture - our media and Internet forums certainly do not help.

For nature to do what we're doing now would require something along  the lines of the end-Permian mass extinction.

insert face palm here

we do know what component is natural variation and what is man-made tho apparently you do not

now use other palm

Ok, so for an interesting read, I have attached a link to a bulletin from the Michigan College of Mining and Technology....folks who should know a thing or two about copper, because they've seen a thing or two. The Bulletin is from 1936 and is titled, "A Correlation of the Tensile Strength and Electrical Conductivity of Hard-Drawn Copper Wire with Preferred Orientation." 

In short, they test a bunch of samples by cold drawing them in one direction, in alternate/reversed directions, and in two other patterns of drawing one way and the other. They concluded that cold-drawing copper wire creates a preferred orientation of unit cells in the core.  However, the conductivity decreased with more frequent reversals of the drawing direction.  Actual variations appeared to be on the order of about 0.20 percent and the differences in drawing were found not to affect the conductivity of annealed wire.  Annealing the copper wire after cold-drawing increases the conductivity. 

My take on the bulletin is that the authors determined there are indeed surface and cell differences that can occur based on how copper wire is processed.  These differences can be observed by x-ray spectroscopic examination (and possibly electron microscopy?) and can cause very small variations in conductivity that could conceivably be construed as directional differences.  However, the differences are erased when the wire is annealed, which is a process applied to all (almost all?) the wire we use.  In any event, even for non-annealed wire, the differences measured were so small that it would be hard to imagine that somebody could discern a sonic difference in music played through a home audio system due to the wire direction or drawing process.

Does anyone here know of other scientific papers about wire directionality/conductivity relative to processing, from authors without a dog in the fight (i.e., from anyone other than a cable manufacturer or their surrogates)?

http://www.michigan.gov/documents/deq/Bulletin_MCMT_CopperWire_opt_301717_7.pdf