Directional speaker cables - switching direction

Jea48, I don't know if conductor can be directional but copper oxides are semiconductors. Their orientation might be related to grain orientation - a question for metallurgist.

AFAIK dielectric affects speed of current. This speed is not a light speed but closer to 60% of it (5ns/m). I believe this speed is inversely proportional to square root of dielectric constant. Teflon dielectric offers the highest speed up to 85% of the light-speed.

Dielectric absorption is ability of dielectric to store and return energy. I'm not sure how it affects the sound but it can be shown, that charged and discharged capacitor will start building up the voltage again without any external source - just from the energy stored in dielectric and we're not talking microvolts but rather volts. Especially bad in electrolytic caps.

The whole directionality thing really digs at me and does damage to our hobby.

My suspicion is that it started with pro-audio which has directional cables. They are not directional because the crystalline structure of the copper, or the way the jacket was extruded on the copper, but because they were single ended shielded cables. You would connect the shielded ended side wire to the amp side to reduce the chance for EMI.

Probably someone tried these cables on their home system and heard a difference, which happened because of the shielding, and this somehow propagated the belief that directionality is important. A couple of clever marketing guys got in a room and decided that separating their product from another required some advantage. Let's say that they should only go on one way.

I suppose the next logical step would be to say which side is up on a cable, because after all electrons have mass and we only want the good ones at the top of the wire.

Most of the hi-end manufacturers of audio cables use directionality on their products, and some are even using directionality on their network cables which is interesting because TCP broadcast require signal both directions (so is each individual wire in the Cat 6 cable directionalized before assembling the cable?).

I have never seen one IEEE paper or an AES paper on directional cables. Maybe it is a secret art form that only audio cable manufacturers know about? I could be wrong. My lab at work has some pretty long (50ft) high speed (10ghz) BNC cables for measuring EMI and those aren't directional. I think that is crystalline were important, it would be important there.

Jea48, that's a different question. The speed of photons in a medium is a constant. In a vacuum we know it's the speed of light. In copper the speed is some percentage of the speed of light, IIRC about 70% times c. So, I don't think the dielectric material affects the speed.

Kijanki wrote,

"AFAIK dielectric affects speed of current. This speed is not a light speed but closer to 60% of it (5ns/m). I believe this speed is inversely proportional to square root of dielectric constant. Teflon dielectric offers the highest speed up to 85% of the light-speed."

As fate would have it the audio signal is not the current. The near light speed refers to the signal not current.

It is possible, and it has been done!, a cable dielectric and conductor outlay can and will and does direct a signal a particular direction, if the cable is well made, not some cable that is directional but inferior, there is alot of those out there, the difference in sound as said before is not subtle, it is huge!, when I change the direction of my Tara Labs Omega 10 inch jumpers, you can stand out side my house and hear the differnce if I flip the jumpers, very drastic I must say, I am not an engineer, do not ask me to proof it other than come and listen for your self.