Directional interconnect cables

Musicnoise, I agree with most of what you said but the velocity of electrons (called drift velocity) required to move a few A of current inside a copper wire is indeed only a few mm per second.

Musicnoise, I agree with most of what you said but the velocity of electrons (called drift velocity) required to move a few A of current inside a copper wire is indeed only a few mm per second.

For those lay people confused by this. Think of a a wire like a garden hose filled with water. Water being the current. In order to get a drop of water out one end of the hose you only need add a drop the other end. The drop has not moved magicaly thirty feet down the garden hose but the result is as if it had done so.

Sound waves in the room are the same. Remember the Alien film plug "In space, no one can hear you scream" - so this kind of thing won't work in a vacuum. In the same way that the water in the hose transmits a signal the air particles in your room jostle around and bump eachother and convey the pressure wave (acoustic signal) to your ears - this all happens very rapdily (speed of sound). In the case of electrons, this also happens very fast (close to the speed of light - now that is seriously fast!) - even though an indiviudal electron does not physically move very far - think of the wire being stuffed full with electrons.

Audio signals can be thought of in the same way as the garden hose analogy rather than "electrons racing through a wire and encountering all kinds of obstacles". This means a small added pressure (voltage) at one end is all that is needed to get a signal out the other end. It also meand that small impurities (say for example dissolved particles/minerals in the water) have practically no influence on the result. If you were to add a restriction in your hose or a one way valve or a conrtolled nozzle then this would somewhat be analogous to a diode or a transistor in the circuit ;-)

musicnoise must have slept at a Holiday Inn

Musicnoise - as you can see my post was not a joke (part about expensive electrons was). Electromagnetic wave moves in 60-70% of the speed of light but electrons are almost not moving. Small impurities create tiny semiconductor like junctions. It is not possible to measure them since things are happening on the level of microvolts here (-80dB). The way they are oriented may be dependant on cable manufacturing (how cable was drawn). I am speculating here, not knowing exactly what is happening inside. I just wanted to make point that things are much more complicated than we think. Some manufacturers make cables from nine nines copper (99.9999999% pure) and in addition cooling it in hot forms to avoid rapid cooling and crystaline structure (Zero Crystal Copper). Wire like that has one or no crystals per foot while standard oxygen free copper wire has couple of thousand. On the other hand some people buy speaker wire i Home Depot.

Kijanki
"..... wires are diodes....."

Wires are NOT diodes. If anything, they are capacitors, either shielded or twisted pair.

I believe some people may hear a difference when the cable is reversed. This doesn't mean the cable is directional. It means the cable has burned-in in that direction and reversing it undoes all that......