Directionality of wire

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

Sorry you feel that way. Not everything can be measured.
I am done!

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

Re 1936 Michigan Study on wire directionality vs conductivity. Quick synopsis: Old news and contributes little to what we know. We already know that the measured differences in wire conductivity are quite small from the fuse measurement data on the HiFi Tuning website. We also know that the small differences don’t really seem to completely account for the (relatively larger) sonic differences the folks at HiFi Tuning heard when flipping fuses; in fact they - HiFi Tuning -acknowledge that apparent discrepancy in the data sheets. Nevertheless there are measured differences in resistance/conductivity. If wire wasn’t directional wouldn’t one expect no differences at all? Remember, the whole issue is SOUND QUALITY. So wouldn’t it make more sense if skeptics, in order to be more thorough and get to the bottom of this, actually performanced their own LISTENING TESTS? The hallmark of real skepticism is the curiosity and desire to experiment and test for one’s self.

@shadorne,

"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'."


Agreed, all except that this leaves no possible room for personal observation. Yes, anyone can come forward and falsify an observation, but that is merely a complication of truth, not an elimination of it...simply because a false claim can exist does not mean that therefore a True claim Cannot exist.

What you claim in the above is essentially a denial of truth itself. Any verification of truth can potentially and legitimately originate from an observation. Without being granted that possible avenue of acceptance, the truth (according to what you said) is blocked from from ever becoming recognized.

That's a complete denial of the scientific method...which always begins with an observation, btw.