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
insert face palm here
Directionality of wire
I am a fan of Chris Sommovigo's Black Cat and Airwave interconnects. I hope he does not mind me quoting him or naming him on this subject, but Chris does not mark directionality of his IC's. I recently wrote him on the subject and he responded that absent shunting off to ground/dialectric designs, the idea of wire directionality is a complete myth. Same with resistors and fuses. My hunch is that 95% of IC "manufacturers", particularly the one man operations of under $500 IC's mark directionality because they think it lends the appearance of technical sophistication and legitimacy. But even among the "big boys", the myth gets thrown around like so much accepted common knowledge. Thoughts? Someone care to educate me on how a simple IC or PC or speaker cable or fuse without a special shunting scheme can possibly have directionality? It was this comment by Stephen Mejias (then of Audioquest and in the context of Herb Reichert's review of the AQ Niagra 1000) that prompts my question;
Thank you for the excellent question. AudioQuest provided an NRG-10 AC cable for the evaluation. Like all AudioQuest cables, our AC cables use solid conductors that are carefully controlled for low-noise directionality. We see this as a benefit for all applications -- one that becomes especially important when discussing our Niagara units. Because our AC cables use conductors that have been properly controlled for low-noise directionality, they complement the Niagara System’s patented Ground-Noise Dissipation Technology. Other AC cables would work, but may or may not allow the Niagara to reach its full potential. If you'd like more information on our use of directionality to minimize the harmful effects of high-frequency noise, please visit http://www.audioquest.com/directionality-its-all-about-noise/ or the Niagara 1000's owner's manual (available on our website).
Thanks again.
Stephen Mejias
AudioQuest
Read more at https://www.stereophile.com/content/gramophone-dreams-15-audioquest-niagara-1000-hifiman-he1000-v2-p...
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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 |
Sorry you feel that way. Not everything can be measured. 1: Every component you have has been designed using measurements. 2: Any changes to the sound the designer needed to make was done using measurements then listened to. 3: There is no voodoo in designing equipment by any designer of any component you have in your system. Cheers George |
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