How are cables directional?

There’s that introduction of ‘double blind’ again!

Undoubtedly there are differences in people’s hearing, so multiple people being unable to hear a difference when one person can is of no relevance to whether or not there is a difference in sound. But what would be significant is if the person claiming to hear a difference consistently hears that difference with “blind” listening. If they can then it would confirm that there is some difference. Multiple people hearing the same unblind is not in itself proof of a difference in sound because they each could be influenced by other factors. However, it would carry weight if multiple independent people claim to have heard a the same difference prior to being aware that others have either said the same or suggested it can happen.

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I didn’t say they don’t. But it’s all driven by the hot, with the reverse flowing over the ground. I’m saying the ground connection is not driven. Unless it is a push/pull output stage (and most are not), only the hot is driven and the return goes to the case or something. For example, the hot (red) terminals on the amp are separate but the ground is common. You can swap the ground (black) over and it won’t do anything - you’ll still hear the same music in phase over the same channels. Similarly, if you look at DIN assignment, there are two hots (one per channel) and a single ground which carries return from both.

Then there is coaxial cables where the important centre conductor in the middle of the shield/ground. That’s carrying AC but the return is not the signal carrier. Both positive and negative sine waves originate on the hot. Remember what I mentioned about early telephone lines being just a single wire.

Current flows over the return because it makes a circuit with the hot, not because signal comes from both.

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I have always followed the directions because why not, but honestly I don’t really buy it, or at least I doubt I could tell the difference if someone tested me to do so, even if I didn’t know I was being tested.

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Pretty skeptical about this sort of stuff here. I think there is a lot of psychoacoustic effect at play in Hifi settings which is not to dismiss those effects as irrelevant - but ‘improvements’ are primarily mental than physical. The physics of electrics is just too well understood for there to be end used application specific differences for equivalent products (home audio versus pro audio cabling for example).

However many trusted manufacturers take the time and effort to put directionality indicators on their cables. This will even in some cases make the assembly more complex. I assume that cable manufacturers would understand said physics (at some point I have to trust experts when I myself am not one in the field in question).

I mean the only explanations for directional indicators in high end audio cables are:

  1. There is actually something to it.
  2. The manufacturers themselves do not understand the cables they make.
  3. The manufacturers are willfully trying to dupe us to make more money.
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As a generalisation, many of us would agree.

On the other hand, when it comes to the specifics, such as the Roy George example above (or many of the others), are you assuming that those reporting are delusional, daft or dishonest?

I appreciate that different D-words, or more than one, may apply to each case.

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In the world of audio, peace of mind should be the ultimate goal. I always follow the arrows and try not to ask myself questions.
Customer’s capacity to reason will always lose vs the market’s capacity to persuade.

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Either the results are reliably repeatable in blind tests or there is a pyschoactive phenomena at play - there isn’t really any other options. Who knows how the brain really processes all this so it’s not about being daft or delusional but if you can’t show a measurable and repeatable physical effect then it has to be something else. I’m not discounting the validity of the qualia for the individual listener.

I’m not a measure or bust purist - I can hear the deifferences between speaker cables sometimes but I fully accept that my own bias/perceptions etc is the likely cause of this rather than anything inherent in the cable itself

Personally… (and YMMV…), I will have the Directionality Faeries in my favour, please… :fairy:

Its not really that hard to connect your cable the ‘right’ way - other than working out which way this is. Naim A5 is easy - its got arrows on it. Other Naim cable just have a marker, which needs to go at the ‘source’ end - which is sometimes difficult to work out… :thinking: :disappointed_relieved:

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Indeed, and as others have observed, there is nothing to lose connecting the recommended way round, if there is one.

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Of course unless you’re one of life’s contrary individuals there is no reason to doubt those little arrows and I find them actually strangely comforting.

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And the ‘sceptics’ would then be obliged to acknowledge that they are ‘deaf’.

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Precisely. There are many other things I don’t fully understand either but still follow the instructions when using it.

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Like when the missus asks me to do something.

Honestly, it’s the best thing to do…

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That looks fair, though there is a big difference between ‘repeatable’ and ‘measurable and repeatable’. ‘Measurable’ is also not the same as ‘one of those things that is easily and normally measured to a universally accepted degree of significance.’

To take a trivial example, if I toss a coin and someone calls it right 1/1, I need no detailed explanation because chance is so likely to explain it. That may also be the complete explanation if they call it correctly 49/50 of course, but assuming that there is no other explanation in that case would be perverse. I do not need to know what trick is being used to be pretty confident that something beyond chance is involved.

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And, as your punctuation suggests, some in the ‘sceptical’ camp are being far from sceptical in a classical sense.

That doesn’t means that scepticism is not necessary when looking at lots of this stuff of course - even the most ardent Subjectivist would surely agree that there is plenty of Woo and bad science and cynical deception in hifi.

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  1. Customers ask for/about it, and since it doesn’t hurt and the additional printing cost is likely insignificant, let’s just put it on there. (Might explain why for example Nordost is so ambiguous about it)
  2. Make their cables stand out vs others that don’t have it. There are plenty of manufacturers out there competing of course.
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There is a nice book on statistics and null hypothesis testing entitled “The Lady Tasting Tea”, very worthwhile if only to read the first chapter with the historical / titular example… Hint: she correctly identified 20/20 randomized cups of tea, 10 of which had milk in first, 10 the other way round. Ironically, and apropos this thread, the statistician who performed this experiment (my memory is vague here, but it may have been Fisher) to illustrate things to his colleagues cast the results aside and concluded that since there is, of course, no difference between tea with milk added first or second, that something else had gone wrong…

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And how it makes it smoother - particularly with an AC signal - I can’t imagine. How are the electrons affected?

Well that is the one thing one certainly just does without asking why :smiley:

Which kind of falls inside point 3. Putting something on that is supposed to do something but is a placebo to make more money.

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