Directional cables - what does that really mean?

Jea48 - yes... seems that the question is not new. I should have looked at prior art before starting a new tread. Bummer.

Geoff - hmm. The information flows in one direction (from source to receiver, as Czarivey kindly sketched out for us), with an alternating flow of electrons (back and forth, or forth and back depending on the phase) as carrier. No carrier, no information - unless I'm sadly mistaken about how things work in this universe.

Mapman and Hevac1 - thank you - preferential grounding and the magical network gadget look like legitimate reasons. Short of that - I am inclined to view with suspicion any cable that is overtly directional. I would also expect such cable be also more sensitive to phase inversion (though I did not check experimentally).

Thank you for chipping in - I learned.

C>

Umm... no, I'd be surprised to find that we purposefully rectify audio signals. That would, as you indicate, keep electrons moving in one direction only, while folding one phase over the other with a couple of diodes (or cutting out one phase altogether with a single one?). Probably not happening that way, unless it is a mild, unintended effect of the interconnect (directional?).

Thank you for correcting Geoff's view.

oh - I read that thread... turned out awful.

@WillieWonka - Thank you for the summary, makes sense for practical use. I continue being suspicious about the arrows, but I understand and agree with your explanation: some of the reasons are legit. Thanks.

@Jea48 - Yes, the audio signal is brought upon by the electrons doing a little alternating dance back and forth, and pushing/pulling on their neighbors to dance with them, and their neighbors pushing their next-next neighbors etc... If they would be marching together towards the end of the cable without coming back to about their original location - that uniform movement would be a DC signal that carries no audio info by itself.

@Jea48 - when talking about electrons in motion physics calls it current and not wave. The EM wave terminology is usually reserved for radiation. However, we agree - is not "the" electron at the source that runs down the wire to pass on the information.

I'm more curious about the effect of extrusion (that sounds like pulling the wire from the melt, or further purifying it through local melting and re-crystallization to push out insoluble impurities and minimize grain boundaries). How would THAT influence directionality? (I understand that preferential shielding can impact overall noise - that would not affect signal propagation but rather the added noise from external sources).

C.