This is hilarious. You are sold the idea of a "pipe", through which something flows -- of course, having a "smoother" directional pipe would be better! But then

This is hilarious. You are sold the idea of a "pipe", through which something flows -- of course, having a "smoother" directional pipe would be better! But then again, we are talking about electrons -- alternating currents -- flowing one way _and_ the other for a short while. Having knowledge about how currents move in leads, typically on the surface of the lead, explains why quality cables consists of a multitude of small leads. On these leads, electrons are flowing a little bit in one direction and then as the polarity of the source shifts, a little bit in the other. The whole idea of having a "direction" in a cable is just... At one time we really had analog equipment "all the way down", so it kind of made sense to minimise distortion and loss in every individual link. Nowadays, we use digital systems where the music information is conveyed as "symbols". In this realm, a lot of the concepts from analog systems (or even the "pipe" system mentioned above) just makes no sense. It is true that the digital information is still run over analog cables, in this case I assume we are talking about an Ethernet layer, but it has very little resemblance with the idea of a loudspeaker cable as information is packaged and translated in various ways before actually appearing on the cable. Do you remember that funny marker pen that you could use to paint the edge of CDs to minimise effects of laser light running back and forth in the CD. That was a try att connecting a common understanding of the turntable with the new CD medium -- the idea of having a pickup that could be disturbed. I wonder onto what common understanding the idea of these cables are trying to connect, the water pipe idea is visual and easily taken but jumps a generation or two of reality. I choose to see this as a taxation of... less gifted but wondrously more wealthy people. Actually a tax that kind of makes sense.