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...


128x128fsonicsmith
Huh? What I stated is still true. The caps that have the same capacitance and the same precision sound different.Who cares any other characteristics?
That is called cherry picking part of the conversation to divert attention from the overall discussion. You did not merely state

The caps that have the same capacitance and the same precision sound different.

you then drew a conclusion that measurements therefore don’t tell us the whole story. You conveniently failed to mention that in your last post.. and that was the whole basis of my comment.

Your conclusion was based on an incomplete analysis of the situation. Simple example.. A 1 watt 1% resistor made of carbon with very low inductance will sound different than a 1 watt 1% wire wound resistor with much higher inductance. The latter will act as a low or high pass filter depending on how it is used. If you ignore the inductance you would conclude there is something that measurements don’t tell you when the fact is you just failed to measure and take into account an important parameter.

Who cares? Those who care about finding what they believe to be the best sounding components without using trial and error. If you are designing RF circuits and fail to take into account the inductance of resistors, the resistance of inductors, the inductance of a capacitor, etc. you aren’t going to get the results you want. If somebody would take the time to measure everything there is to measure about the components a correlation could be made between those measurements and how they function. I am open to the possibility that there may well be things we are unaware of and therefore can’t measure and take into account, but picking 2 matching parameters as proof that no other measurements matter is simply incorrect.

Have you ever once in your life stated "oh, I see, I was wrong" or do you just like to argue for the sake of argument. I’m done with this part of the thread.

Just in case you’re a little late to the game, all wires per se are inherently asymmetrical - physically - when drawn through the final die.


I acknowledged that in my post, I said

If the way the wire is drawn results in an asymmetrical crystal structure I suppose there could be an effect.
about this
The speaker transducer moves forward and backward according to EMF acting on the voice coil - see Faraday’s law and Maxwells equations - so both +ve and -ve current direction along the speaker wire causes transducer movement.

Again, it has nothing to do with we commonly call "current" which most visualize as electrons flowing back and forth. It simply doesn’t work that way. There is an electro-magnetic wave that transfers energy to the coil of the speaker. If applied to a resistor it creates heat. If applied to an inductor (coil) it creates a constantly changing magnetic field which pushes and pulls against a fixed magnet creating motion. Those stuck in a world of flowing electrons are just that, stuck there. Energy flows, electrons do not.

It is illogical to say that "electricity" or current or voltage is an electromagnetic wave AND that audio signal must travel outside the copper conductor. And here's why. The only thing that travels at lightspeed is photons. And all photons travel at lightspeed. You know, 186,000 miles per second in a vacuum and less in a different medium such as air. And even less in denser mediums. The reason why the audio signal travels at say, 70% the speed of light in a copper conductor is because the audio signal is traveling through copper. It’s not because it’s traveling through air. If it was traveling through air the velocity of the audio signal would be just slightly lower than its velocity through a vacuum. If you measure the time it takes a radio signal to go from a transmitter on Earth to a satellite in synchronous orbit and back, you know, at 24k miles high orbit you will find that the elapsed time up and down is approximately the same time as if there were no air, no atmosphere. That’s because electromagnetic waves are barely slowed at all when they travel through air, which has an Index of Refraction of 1.0003. This all means the audio signal electromagnetic waves must be traveling through the copper, not outside the copper, just like voltage and current.

Photons with higher energy than light can obviously travel through solid objects, like say, X-rays and gamma rays. They are all comprised of photons. The entire electromagnetic spectrum is composed of photons. Radio waves, X rays, light rays of various colors, they’re all photons.

@geofkkait,


Quote from Ralph Morrison
The laws I want to talk about are the basic laws of electricity. I'm not
referring to circuit theory laws as described by Kirchhoff or Ohm but the
laws governing the electric and magnetic fields. These fields are
fundamental to all electrical activity whether the phenomenon is lightning,
electrostatic display, radar, antennas, sunlight, and power generation,
analog or digital circuitry.



These laws are often called Maxwell's equations. Light energy can be
directed by lenses, radar energy can be directed by waveguides and the
energy and power frequencies can be direct conductors. Thus we direct energy
flow at different frequencies by using different material.



For utility power the energy travels in the space between the conductors not
in the conductors. In digital circuits the signal and energy travel in the
spaces between the traces or between the traces and the conducting surfaces.
Buildings have halls and walls. People move in the halls not the walls.
Circuits have traces and spaces, signals and energy moves in the spaces not
the traces.



https://books.google.com/books?id=t7EB4PJMPVsC&pg=PT20&dq=moving+electrical+
energy,+ralph+morrison&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwisrtrwlIPNAhWkyoMKHX-MCsAQ6AEIL
DAD#v=onepage&q=moving%20electrical%20energy%2C%20ralph%20morrison&f=false

Here are a couple links for you to read on the subject.

http://science.uniserve.edu.au/school/curric/stage6/phys/stw2002/sefton.pdf

http://amasci.com/miscon/elect.html

herman                                                      1,946 posts08-06-2017 12:42pm


about this
The speaker transducer moves forward and backward according to EMF acting on the voice coil - see Faraday’s law and Maxwells equations - so both +ve and -ve current direction along the speaker wire causes transducer movement.

Again, it has nothing to do with we commonly call "current" which most visualize as electrons flowing back and forth. It simply doesn’t work that way. There is an electro-magnetic wave that transfers energy to the coil of the speaker. If applied to a resistor it creates heat. If applied to an inductor (coil) it creates a constantly changing magnetic field which pushes and pulls against a fixed magnet creating motion. Those stuck in a world of flowing electrons are just that, stuck there. Energy flows, electrons do not.

Thanks herman for the explanation.
Jim
geoffkait:
It is illogical to say that "electricity" or current or voltage is an electromagnetic wave ...

>>>>While you may think it's illogical, electrical energy transfer still happens through the electromagnetic field. The paper I referred to earlier shows how this works for DC. The energy flows in the direction of the Poynting vector. For a zero resistance cable, this vector is zero inside the cable (there is no electric field), and it is oriented parallel to cable outside the cable. For a non-ideal cable the Poynting vector has a small component directed  perpendicular to cable, transferring energy into the cable, causing ohmic heating.

geoffkait:
The reason why the audio signal travels at say, 70% the speed of light in a copper conductor is because the audio signal is traveling through copper.

>>>>This is patently untrue. The propagation speed is limited by the dielectric constant of the material surrounding the conductor. Look up, e.g., propagation speeds for coaxial cables.