How are cables directional?

My conclusion is unchanged by this thread: to put them in in the direction the manufacturer instructs you to.

Unless you fancy testing it yourself, which I don’t.

I find having a direction indicator useful on a cable, even if its main purpose is just to make sure that when you move it, you keep using it in the same direction when you put it back.

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It is very simple, and doesn’t cost a penny. Regardless of what anyone else says, including the manufacturer, try one way round, then the other. Maybe repeat two or three times. If you can tell a difference, whether real or imagined, use the way round that sounds best. If not then just stop and enjoy the music,

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I wonder: among those who fervently believe that cable directionality is a load of scientifically baseless snake oil, how many of them orientate their cables according to the manufacturer’s directions?

A good read on the magic of human ears.

alpha-audio .net/background/our-best-measuring-tool-our-own-ears/

But did you know that our ear can detect a difference of 0.005 Pa? That’s a difference of 5 millionths of a percent!

AND TO PERHAPS PUT IT EVEN MORE IN PERSPECTIVE: WE’RE TALKING ABOUT A SPACE OF MOTION, LESS THAN THE DIAMETER OF ONE ATOM… THAT’S HOW SENSITIVE HEARING IS.

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Eh?

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Hmm. got a little dubious when he says:
"But did you know that our ear can detect a difference of 0.005 Pa? "
and then almost immediately:
“Perhaps this clears up why we sometimes hear things we cannot – yet – measure.”
Um - but we obviously can measure that - else how do we know that the ear can detect that difference? Some woolly thinking there, I think.
Then he goes on about the difference between sight and hearing - and talks about octaves in the frequency of light, saying that we can hear 10 octaves in sound, much less in light. That makes little sense - the two are not comparable. Not at all sure what the relevance of that is, though.

Then he writes about localisation. He points out that the ear (or rather, it should be the combination of ear and brain) can detect differences in the timing of sound reaching each ear of about 10 microseconds. Then says that it takes a millisecond for the signal to travel to the brain, and seems to think that this makes it impossible for the brain to detect a 10 microsecond difference. I don’t see why it should be impossible. It could take several years for the signal to reach the brain and - so long as that 10 microsecond difference is preserved - the difference would still tell you which signal arrived first. And “science” may not know exactly how this work, but scientists have a pretty good idea.

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He does a lot of measuring himself and publish the result on his page. As I read it he mean that there’s a lot of things you don’t measure in HIFI which actually influence what you hear and therefore measurements are not the answer and that you actually can hear things that the traditional measurements used in HIFI don’t show.

Huge amount of garbage in this thread.

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Just this thread?

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Just been to the opticians … yes. I know, this thread is about sound !

Anyways, we went through that part of the assessment where the optician holds a sequence of magnifying lenses in front of each eye and “flips” each lens saying “Is that better ? or worse ?” referring to the Snellen Chart of letters that you are trying to read.

Made me think of this thread and hifi selection in general !

Would be nice if someone could invent a fool-proof machine to saved all this “is that better ? or worse ?” malarkey. Both for eye-sight and hifi :sunglasses:

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Would that be better then?

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The “is that better or worse” sometimes is straightforward, other times I have to ask several times to flick back and forth - AB testing. One thing I’ve never considered at the optician is blind testing…!

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I’m sure there are people who will go out of their way and make a point to expend extra effort to hook up their hifi back to front and upside down just because they don’t believe in X.

Or just because someone else in a forum doesn’t believe in X…

Makes every sense if very heavy and with no controls on the front, when far easier to set up, or swap cables, or break and remake contacts. On some amp and location combinations left-right labelled speaker terminals would then be the correct sides of the amp. And some electronics even helpfully have the mains switch on the back! But not very practical for CD players or for preamps with needed controls located on the front. IIRC one Jimmy Hughes, so-called hifi reviewer, was reputed to prefer speakers facing backwards…

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Boenicke even makes them that way :crazy_face:

Yes, but it was a very specific and rather unusual situation, and using horns IIRC. I seem to recall he had a place in the Barbican with a living room on two levels, where the speakers were situated at the window end of the lower level firing into a very reflective surface which would bounce the sound back up to the upper listening area - made for a very spacious sound that probably well suited his taste in classical music.

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