Directionality of wire

And since ALL fuses are directional we can probably conclude it’s the wire itself, not (rpt not) the dielectric material, at least not (rpt not) to any significant degree. This whole wire directionality thing is actually an excellent example of Occam’s razor: Suppose there exist two explanations for an occurrence. In the case of two possibile explanations the simpler one is usually the correct or better one. Another way of saying it is that the more assumptions you have to make, the more unlikely an explanation is.

terry9497 posts08-18-2017 11:31am@jea48

Yes also to IC's.

Further to the above, I forgot that about 20 years ago, when I saw IC costs going stratospheric, I decided to do an experiment.

I built a cabinet for ARC SP10 pre-amp and Nakamichi CR7, which was a Faraday cage. I then noted that, at line levels, capacitance was the enemy, not inductance, so I found some very pure 4 nines silver 24 AWG and had it gold plated.

I drilled holes in the bulkhead between the ARC and the Nak which were 2" apart and threaded bare wires through them, and then protected the wires with 0.375 teflon tubing, which touched the wires scarcely at all. Thus, compared to conventional co-ax of whatever manufacture, dielectric absorption was near zero, as was capacitance. Cables were 26 inches and terminated with ETI RCA's.

I was then in a position to conduct a single-blind experiment of theoretically optimal cables compared to Canare Starquad. An expert test subject (my long suffering wife) was unable to detect the difference reliably. Of less interest, because I was not a blind subject, I was also unable to hear the difference.

This is NOT definitive because the subject was not required to make many, many repeated observations for statistical analysis. But the point was clear: there ARE things that yield readily detectable differences, like turntables, tonearms, cartridges, SUT's, tubes, pre-amp topology, power supplies, capacitors, resistors, amplifier topology, and speakers.

So the latter is where I spend my money.

sean
6,229                                                                      posts10-09-2006 11:49am


I stumbled across a very curious phenomena pertaining to cable dielectric at work the other day. Nobody that i have discussed the matter with can explain what is happening, yet they have seen the very easily measured and duplicated results that i’m obtaining and can’t deny them.

I have ideas as to what is causing this curious phenomena, but don’t want to speak up about this as of yet. I will say that what i’m seeing tends to make me believe that dielectrics, which aren’t supposed to conduct, have a polarity / directionality to them i.e. they conduct better in one direction than in another.

I know that some companies already have cabling on the market that supposedly deals with this subject, but i don’t think that they fully understand exactly what is going on here. I just hope that Clark Johnsen doesn’t see this. Something about polarity based issues tends to get him in all worked up : ) Sean

I will say that what i’m seeing tends to make me believe that dielectrics, which aren’t supposed to conduct, have a polarity / directionality to them i.e. they conduct better in one direction than in another.