Directional wires/cables

@mclinnguy

I watched the video on cable directionality. The guy thinks the signal travels back and forth in the wire. It doesn’t. If it did then cheap PVC insulation would be all that is needed for the dielectric used to cover the bare wire.

This post From an Agon member.

 

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.

Response from an Agon member that taught this stuff, at the associate degree level..

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.

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I don’t know why cables are directional. I just know some are.

I have a pair of Clear Day Cables solid silver conductor non shielded single ended RCA interconnects that are definitely directional. Hands down...

AA members that actually built there own cables and the problems they ran into.Lots of posts on cables on AA Cable asylum.

This is just one of many.

https://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=cables&n=12332&highlight=rcrump+wire+direction

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@jea48

Ok, I was just pointing out that Inakustik essentially do not use a dielectric on their wire.

I watched the video on cable directionality. The guy thinks the signal travels back and forth in the wire. It doesn’t. If it did then cheap PVC insulation would be all that is needed for the dielectric used to cover the bare wire.

I don’t know exactly where to go with that, but:

We do know the electromagnetic wave is carried from amplifier to speaker via an alternating current. If this energy wave is what we call the "signal" does it not change directions 120 times per second, otherwise known as 60Hz in North America? It is also more recently been hypothesized (proven?) that the actual electrons only travel a few centimetres.

For my own curiosity wondering how far the "signal" would go: From what I gather this "signal" travels in this medium at a rate of 0.7c, or about 195,000 km per second, so at 60Hz every 0.0167 seconds the energy wave can travel 3250 kilometres before changing directions. Obviously our speaker cables are not that long, and there are huge losses over such distances, but ignoring this, here is a question that just popped into my head: If the speakers were 3251 kilometres away would there be no signal- would the energy simply stop and turn back the other direction, and one would hear no sound from the speaker?

You might say that I started some of this discussion with my own misconceptions in regards to AC power flow, for which now I stand corrected and beg forgiveness.  

It has been a learning experience for me.

But @jea48, your last paragraph just made my brain explode.  Does that mean if Jimmy Page plays a cord on his guitar in LA that they can't hear it in NYC.   LOL

- Jeff

@jeffbij said:

But @jea48, your last paragraph just made my brain explode.  Does that mean if Jimmy Page plays a cord on his guitar in LA that they can't hear it in NYC.   LOL

You referring to this?

I don’t know why cables are directional. I just know some are.

I have a pair of Clear Day Cables solid silver conductor non shielded single ended RCA interconnects that are definitely directional. Hands down...

???

@jea48 , honestly, I don’t remember, it was 50 years ago.  I would say through the wire.  I don’t know if it was even covered.  I always took it as a given the signal goes through the wire.  I think at the time, Monster Cable had just debuted.  I was using Mogami speaker wire at the time because a friend who worked for the telephone company got his hands on some.