Interconnect Directionality

Food for thought indeed! 🍔 🥨🍰 More food for thought - Audioquest and maybe others highly polishes the surface of their high end solid core copper and silver. Does polishing reduce or perhaps eliminate directionality of the wire? Or is it for some other reason?

Totally weird that people who make cables that work at 100GHz don't know this, but people who make 20KHz audio cables do .... strange ... very strange, almost like it is not true.

Cables are direction for shielding. Cables are directional where intentional elements have been added at one end. The rare, and very rare very very high frequency RF cable (10's of GHz) is direction because the control the impedance along the length for end to end impedance matching.

Since you know this stuff so intimately, I am sure YOU can put some hard numbers around the capacitance, inductance, bulk-impedance, etc. of these audio cables and relate that to amplifier, pre-amp, and speaker complex impedance and what the typical impacts the values of these cables will have on signal transmission. I mean that should be brutally simple for you right? You shouldn't even need Google ..... now after you do that, please relate that to the average impedance and response consistency unit to unit (variance) between capacitors, resistors, speakers etc. in the signal change. I can wait and I am sure others would like to hear your brilliance.


geoffkait17,586 posts10-14-2019 10:56amThings are worse than that ( connectors). A lot worse. In a nut shell all wire is directional. I am not the one who did it so don’t blame me. I did not invent reality. That’s why all cables and power cords and fuses are directional. That’s also why digital cables are directional. That’s why foreword thinking companies like Audioquest and Goertz and Anti Cables control directionality of cables from the get go. You have to honor the inherent natural directionality of wire. 🔜 HDMI Cables, Ethernet cables are also directionality. There is a separate issue with shielding but ideally the shielding direction should conform to the wire directionality. Same with connectors, if they are in fact directional, which they may be. Who knows? So, to summarize, all wire is directional and all wire in everything should be controlled for directionality, speaker internal wire, transformers, capacitors, internal component wiring. You name it.

roberttcan" I am sure YOU can put some hard numbers around the capacitance, inductance, bulk-impedance, etc. of these audio cables and relate that to amplifier, pre-amp, and speaker complex impedance and what the typical impacts the values of these cables will have on signal transmission. I mean that should be brutally simple for you right? You shouldn't even need Google ..... now after you do that, please relate that to the average impedance and response consistency unit to unit (variance) between capacitors, resistors, speakers etc. in the signal change. I can wait and I am sure others would like to hear your brilliance."

No one here is compelled, obligated, or required to conduct upon you're request, instruction, or demand any specific scientific studies, research, or explanation as to what they hear, percieve, and claim it is entirely upon you to perform such study, assessment, and analysis and since you state with unqualified, unrestricted, and absolute certainty I am sure it will be easy for you to comply with that which you insist others perform on you're behalf. 

Hey, question for the group, are clearthink, and geoffkait the same person?  The reason I ask it that clearthink seems to think he needs to speak for geoffkait. Me believing geoffkait is an adult, believes that perhaps he can speak for himself.

NO clearthink, I don't need to prove anything .... though I can easily show that frequency effects are <0.1db on interconnects (MM phono cables excepted), and impacts on phase are so close to be 0 as to be 0.

HOWEVER, anyone with any idea about MFG of audio products knows that resistors are likely to be at 1% tolerance (and worse in many tube amps), the best capacitors 2-3% and many 5-20% tolerance, and changes in room temp and self-heating based on the music volume can have significantly larger effects.  Let's add in changes in parameters due to the self heating of voice coils will have a larger impact than cable direction, and that is not even taking into account the large variation from unit to unit in speaker MFG.

You know what else has a dramatically larger impact on sound transmission than the direction of a cable (shielding aside). Room humidity, especially if you have a larger listening room. Changes in room humidity could easily swamp out any differences you will see changing from one cable to another or from one interconnect to another or the direction.

However, to quote Hitchen's, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence". A non-controlled listening test is not "evidence", it is anecdote. Learn the difference please. There are lots of anecdotes here, but there are no evidence. Astrologers use anecdotes ...  (so do people who believe the earth is flat).