Directional interconnect cables

Shadorne - wires are diodes. some impurities in the wire might create semiconductor junctions. As an example - copper oxide (wire in never 100% oxygen free) behaves like semiconductor. It was used to make rectifiers. Quote from Wikipedia below:

"Copper(I) oxide was the first substance known to behave as a semiconductor. Rectifier diodes based on this material were used industrially as early as 1924, long before silicon became the standard."

What happens inside of the wire is complicated. Electrons are not moving very fast (about 1/2" per second) and with AC signal they will never leave the cable. I would not polarize my cable with DC and loose my expensive electrons I paid for (ha ha).

I am assuming that Kijanki's entire post was intended as a joke, however for those who may take it seriously, the following:
Whether Copper oxide was ever used to make diodes does not support the notion that wires are diodes. The comparision is merely an example of faulty reasoning - "copper oxide can be used to make diodes, wires are made from copper, hence, wires are diodes." Socrates would love that one. The next time a diode goes out in a piece of electronic equipment, don't buy another diode, just grab a piece of glass (silicon) and tape it to the pcb. Diodes don't just magically appear because they are composed of an element that can also be used to make diodes. We are then in the realm of alchemy. The last bit of faulty reasoning I heard on this site as to new and exciting diode manufacturing techniques was that diodes were created by the extrusion process in manufacturing wire, I guess that theory was that the process created a taper and that resulted in a diode - kind of like a funnel I suppose - make up the science as you go along approach. Furthermore, what happens inside a wire is well defined, complicated or not, with regard to the effect the wire has on an electrical signal transduced to sound. Whatever deep quantum mysteries lurk within the realm of the eerie wire are of no significance when it comes to listening to the end result or in measuring the audio frequency signal at the ends of the wires. Surely the remark as to the speed of current flow within a wire was intended as a joke, and if not, even readers with no technical or scientific background will realize that this is an incorrect statement. One thing I have always wondered with the mysteries beyond the realm of science argument is how we are able to repeatedly make reliable complicated electronic equipment if there is so much to chance as a meaningful probability that a wire will act as a diode. Wires are not diodes, diodes are diodes, wires conduct equally well in either direction.

Musicnoise, I agree with most of what you said but the velocity of electrons (called drift velocity) required to move a few A of current inside a copper wire is indeed only a few mm per second.

Musicnoise, I agree with most of what you said but the velocity of electrons (called drift velocity) required to move a few A of current inside a copper wire is indeed only a few mm per second.

For those lay people confused by this. Think of a a wire like a garden hose filled with water. Water being the current. In order to get a drop of water out one end of the hose you only need add a drop the other end. The drop has not moved magicaly thirty feet down the garden hose but the result is as if it had done so.

Sound waves in the room are the same. Remember the Alien film plug "In space, no one can hear you scream" - so this kind of thing won't work in a vacuum. In the same way that the water in the hose transmits a signal the air particles in your room jostle around and bump eachother and convey the pressure wave (acoustic signal) to your ears - this all happens very rapdily (speed of sound). In the case of electrons, this also happens very fast (close to the speed of light - now that is seriously fast!) - even though an indiviudal electron does not physically move very far - think of the wire being stuffed full with electrons.

Audio signals can be thought of in the same way as the garden hose analogy rather than "electrons racing through a wire and encountering all kinds of obstacles". This means a small added pressure (voltage) at one end is all that is needed to get a signal out the other end. It also meand that small impurities (say for example dissolved particles/minerals in the water) have practically no influence on the result. If you were to add a restriction in your hose or a one way valve or a conrtolled nozzle then this would somewhat be analogous to a diode or a transistor in the circuit ;-)

musicnoise must have slept at a Holiday Inn