What do we hear when we change the direction of a wire?

@turnbowm
Wire directionality in an alternating current (AC) application? How interesting...

Here it is even more interesting, if of course you are really interested in understanding.

I find it astounding that one of the most eminent cable manufacturerers makes an unambiguous case for directionality and yet all manner of pundits refute it without offering any substantive argument. This sort of thread is useless.

ted_denney nailed it:

The differences heard are the difference between a more solid and focused sound, and one that is phasy and incoherent. 

The first time using one of his Blue Fuses the sound was more dynamic with a blacker background, but also was not solid, focused and coherent. I have used lots of Synergistic over the years, it is always solid, focused and coherent. So within about a minute of listening I switched the fuse around. It was immediately apparent this is the correct direction. 

Now I am in the process of upgrading my crossovers. I know from experience there are huge gains to be made from using higher quality caps, inductors, and resistors. This is strange only in the sense that these are all specifically designed to measure the same. The whole point of manufacture is to have them all be electrically identical and interchangeable.  

Well they are in the sense that they work. They most definitely are NOT in the sense that they all sound the same. This is beyond debate. The differences are so obvious and easy to hear it can only be the people who argue this have never tried, or they have and simply refuse to believe their own experience.  

I do not however think this means there has to be some additional unaccounted for signal there waiting to be discovered. I find it much more likely we simply have vastly underestimated the human sensory potential.  

When we "sense" something with our senses it is nothing like what a meter does. The meter measures one tiny little aspect of one tiny little thing. Our senses are comparatively universal. Psychologists have a devil of a time designing experiments precisely because we have so many different ways of sensing things. It is extremely challenging to narrow them down. This is not even talking about mental aspects, the "bias" card so many scoundrels love to play. This is simply the way we work, and it is vastly different than any meter. 

None of our sensory systems fire off a signal that says to the brain, "Incoming! 92.7dB at 5kHz!" Not at all.

What happens instead is millions of neurons become excited and send an electrical impulse down the axon to a synapse. Millions. Just because it is sound, do not for one minute think this means all the neurons are in the ear. Every sensory neuron is doing this! Simultaneously! Throughout your whole body!   

It is even kind of silly to focus so much on just what we "hear". I don't think we have even a very good idea what that means, "to hear".  

Case in point. I know Townshend Podiums work. I know how they work and that they do in fact work. Had a guy recently use them and he was disappointed. In talking to him it turns out one of the things he likes about his speakers is the way they send bass through the floor up into his legs and butt sitting on the chair. He misses that and his speakers don't have enough bass to make up for what he lost. Which, just to make sure everyone gets the point- is what his skin and bones are feeling not his ears!   

We hear with our whole bodies. Another example, my Aunt Bessie, deaf from birth, "heard" me playing music one time. Actually she felt the vibrations coming through in the next room. She came and stood right in front of the speaker, put her hands on it, face lit up with delight. Then there was the recent story of the deaf audiophile who "listens" by holding a balloon. He can differentiate between speaker cables! Thus this legally stone deaf audiophile can "hear" things other audiophiles- who supposedly are not deaf- cannot. 

This is all due to a cascade of millions of neurons firing more or less binary signals that somehow somewhere coalesce into an awareness of music. Or whatever.  

That's on our end. What about the "signal"?  

It is the same, as the French say, only different. On the signal end it is not millions but trillions, or quadrillions, of electrons. Not even electrons really, the electron is merely the particle we posit carries the field. Really it is the field we are talking about. Physical electrons really do not move from one place to another. No electron went from the recording studio to your listening room. It was the field did this. Not the particle. The wave. 

Science cannot even answer the question- is light a particle? Or a wave? Sounds impossible but it is not. Look into it. When we do an experiment to see if light is a particle, sure enough, we detect photons. When we do an experiment to see if light is a wave, what do you know? It is a wave. 

So what we seem to have is a situation where we sample a field of almost incomprehensible complexity (performed music) transform the sample into a field wave (signal in a wire) and transform it back again in our rooms where once again it is sampled only this time by a sensory apparatus (us) of almost incomprehensible complexity. 

I don't think there is anything extra. Pretty sure all we have to do now is figure out how to comprehend the incomprehensible.

One possible physical reason for directionality of cables is due to the direction in which the wire is drawn and voids and irregularities that result from the drawing process.