Wire polarity?

[tubeswell]

I read an interview with the dearly departed Ken F in a book I got out from the local library recently, in which he was reported in the interview (amongst quite a few things about building amps BTW) that 'alot of people don't realise that wire has a polarity' or something similar to that (I am recalling the phrase from memory). This concept has somehow stuck in my head over the last couple of weeks and has prompted me to wonder further about it (I'm a slow thinker ). I take it he would've been referring to single-strand wire in particular? (or could multiple strands somehow induce a polarity??) (or can you buy pre-polarised wire? or do you have to polarise the piece of wire somehow?? like with a high voltage plasma vacuum chamber or something????? - which in case you haven't heard is a device consisting of two electrodes in a vacuum that you energise with a friggin' high voltage to create a electrical plasma arc between them, and whereby by pre-placing a metal object in between the electrodes, you can can get the atoms in the surface layers of that piece of metal lining up in the same direction in order to harden the surface of the metal - like in the way metal bearings can be hardened)

However all that digression aside, being a relatively recent new-comer to trainwreck ideas, the main question I ponder (besides whether the author was reporting the interview verbatim), was how you should determine the polarity of your piece of wire, in order to apply this knowledge? I guess (wildly), that if this reported fact is 'true', then this might have some kind of application something similar to using polarised caps whereby the latter are wired in to a power supply (for example), so that the +ve end is oriented to the B+ side of the cap?

This prompts me to further speculate that given that wire is heretofore thought of by me as a hunk of metal with low resistance/high conductivity, how would any 'polarity' make much difference?

Can anybody shed any light/further speculation on this?

[Structo]

I believe he also said he could here the difference in what color insulation was used on wire.

No offense to Mr. Fischer and I'm not saying there could be a difference or polarity in wire, but I certainly can't hear it.

This probably falls right in line of people paying $300 for a power cord for an amp or wooden $400 volume knobs.

Hype? Psychoacoustics?

[RHGraham]

I wonder sometimes if it's not a case of a bit of miss-quoting coupled with a little bit of missing the point... I had more of an impression that KF was trying to simply make the point that little things matter, in each individual amp... hence the lead-dress sensitivity for example.

Sure, maybe in a particular project, one colour wire sounded better than another that was in there beforehand... but was it the wire colour, or was it maybe a new position of the lead, or maybe a better solder joint...?

This is a guy fairly famous for building awesome amps out of stuff he had... somehow the idea that he'd have to use just one particular wire type and colour to get "the sound" just doesn't seem right to me.

I really think the point really was " pay attention, be carefull, try, listen, and HEAR".

[tubeswell]

Thanks for the replies.

(Wire colour aside for the moment - I recall reading that statement in the interview as well BTW but I am reluctant to go there) understanding how EMF around a live wire can cause unwanted coupling, and therefore that how that wire is positioned in relation to other components/wires has certain impacts, seems somehow less magical than the promise of some (can I say 'mojo'? of ) wire polarity.

Has anyone actually tried to determine the polarity of wire in order to test out this concept?

How might this be done? Would you try to use a minutely positively charged electromagnet to pick up bits of wire off a flat, minutely negatively charged surface maybe?

[jaysg]

Even if you know which way the wire was extruded and assign it a +/- sense, how do you develop a theory of how wire polarity should be employed other than testing every single connection both ways?

[Fischerman]

Has anyone actually tried to determine the polarity of wire in order to test out this concept?

I tried my George L's both ways because I had read someone claimed to hear a difference. I thought I heard a slight one too...but I'm still not convinced. It wasn't a blind test and I know how the human brain can be fooled...and I'm not immune to that. Even though I thought I heard a difference I still just pick up the cable and plug it in. I like to live dangerously.

[Structo]

I remember watching an interview with Eric Johnson about gear.

Most of you know that Eric is extremely anal about his gear and tone bordering on OCD.

At one point, he almost sounded embarrassed, when he said he likes to leave the bottom cover off his Fuzz Face pedal because the screws hurt the tone.

Then he had another pedal (forget which it was now) that was up on a couple blocks of wood because it sounded better that way.

So there probably are people that can hear these things, although I would suspect that musicians that subject their ears to high SPL's may not be able to be quite as objective as they claim.

Think back to the tones we as guitar players worship that were recorded on vinyl with analog eguipment and yes, even tube (gasp) powered analog equipment.

These very musicians employed curly guitar cords well known to be noisy and other effects that were not known for their tone (signal/noise) purity.

But dang, they sure had good tubes back then!

[rooster]

Yeah, I did read somethng like this too, what KF said about the wire jacket, PVC vs teflon, etc. I don't recall any comments about wire polarity but I suspect he probably addressed this somewhere. I know EJ has talked about this. Its kinda specialized thinking perhaps - or maybe even madness - but I don't doubt that just about any and every thing that could possibly explain a sonic mystery was examined by KF. That's who he was I think.

As to the polarity issue.... From what I have learned, that whole polarity direction thing is actually determined by the direction that the wire itself was extruded. If you had a decent microscope, I am told, and if you knew what you were looking for, you could identify this milling signature. Further, I am told again, that if you were to look at the wire on the atomic level, you would see that this extrusion/milling process actually imparts a direction to the electrons in the wire itself. So therefore, when you apply a current to it in this same direction, i.e, positve to negative, it flows more easily.

Interesting, eh? I find this fairly intriguing but I also would probably fail a blind test of the wire in question. Also, where things get kinda weird with all of this is just how does a current alter the electrons extruded direction? I mean, since electrons are passing electrons, on an atomic level, how long would it take to reverse the original direction? It must be like a magnetic field to some degree. If you change a magnet's polarity,
does the magnet become weaker? Actually no, it functions the same - but now with reversed polarity - with whatever gauss magnetic strength you apply to it within the parameters of what the magnetic material will maintain. So wire must be like this, too, I think.

The key might be, if the wire is a speaker cable or an instrument cable, to simply use it in the same direction all the time.....

Wow, it just now occured to me that I will never get this time back........ ...

Anyway, the last thought about wire - in an amp - is pretty much what I expressed about a speaker cable or a gtr cable. Once it is in an amp, I think its directional properties are totally influenced by the current passing through it. ...OK, I will never speak of this again....

[Jackie Treehorn]

Yes, it's true, cables sound different if you reverse them. A year or so ago, I made sound clips of my wreck, 2 identical and 1 with all the cables reversed and posted them on TGP as a listening test. The reversed cables clip was chosen by a wide margin as the clip "most different." When I revealed that the only difference was the cables being reversed, it caused quite a stir. I actually got hate mail from that one. I still have the clips, so PM me if you want to check them out.

In addition to the directionality imparted from the copper being drawn, I've alse heard a theory that the dielectric becomes charged with a polarity during construction. Ken was a fan of making cables from vacuum cleaner AC cords. I believe the logic being that the high current draw resulted in a well broken in cable in a particular direction. I've actually made a few cables this way, and they sound pretty good.

[tubeswell]

Hmmm... I must try the guitar cable reversing trick for myself.

Reflecting on this a bit further, I suppose it would be possible to polarise wire, after all magnets and compass needles are polarised are they not? (although in some obvious cases, this is apparently through application of some kind of magnetized coating)

What's more, as room temperature metal (mercury excepted) is a crystaline (albeit to some degree or other a semi-flexible crystaline) state of molten metal, therefore if you heated it up enough to break or loosen the molecular bonds between atoms enough so that all or some of them could be re-oriented somewhat, and then passed an electrical current through it while it was in this heated state, I guess (wildly again) that you could (theoretically) increase the probability of having atoms aligned in some pattern of +ve/-ve orientation, which may impart an overall 'polarity'. Come to think of it, this could be similar to what happens in the wire extrusion process.

I still find it hard to imagine how this could make much audible difference considering the short lengths of wire that you get inside a guitar amp. Maybe a piece of polarised wire a gazillion miles long might conduct a bit faster than similar a reverse-polarised or unpolarised piece of wire the same length. Hard to say...

Has anyone got a microscopic photograph depicting typical extrusion markers on polarised wire? I am curious to see what they might look like.

[Fischerman]

Reflecting on this a bit further, I suppose it would be possible to polarise wire, after all magnets and compass needles are polarised are they not?

Yea but those are magnetic...copper, aluminum, silver, gold, etc (the stuff wire is made of or sometimes coated with) are not magnetic.

Jackie's clip test sounds interesting. Jackie, if we all play nice and promise no public lynchings could you just post those clips?

[Wayne]

This would be a lot easier for me to buy if guitar cords carried DC and not AC. I try not to discount theories like this cuz I don't have the most discerning ear, but I don't think I'll spend much time chasing this one.

W

[Zippy]

As to the polarity issue.... From what I have learned, that whole polarity direction thing is actually determined by the direction that the wire itself was extruded. If you had a decent microscope, I am told, and if you knew what you were looking for, you could identify this milling signature. Further, I am told again, that if you were to look at the wire on the atomic level, you would see that this extrusion/milling process actually imparts a direction to the electrons in the wire itself. So therefore, when you apply a current to it in this same direction, i.e, positve to negative, it flows more easily.

In addition to the directionality imparted from the copper being drawn, I've alse heard a theory that the dielectric becomes charged with a polarity during construction. Ken was a fan of making cables from vacuum cleaner AC cords. I believe the logic being that the high current draw resulted in a well broken in cable in a particular direction.

Disclosure: I have multiple degrees in applied physics and materials science.

There is variation in the structure of copper that is dependent on the forming operation. Extruded face-centered cubic (FCC) metals will have elongated grains along the axis of the conductor. I have not seen evidence that the grain boundaries have a directionality that will have any (much less a significant) effect on the flow of electrons.

Work in the semiconductor industry some 15-20 years ago, showed the migration of copper and aluminum subject to a unidirectional flow of electrons. This, however, is on a very fine scale - it was in traces of conductor INSIDE semiconductor chips and remains one of the life-limiting factors of chips as the limits are pushed to make ever smaller components.

Consider also that in the context of signals, we are not dealing with DC, so the issue of using vacuum cleaner cords that have been subject to high current flow is fundamentally flawed. Sure, there is some heating of the conductor - we can feel that - but the temperature is generally far below that of 0.5 times the melting temperature of copper, the temperature at which materials scientists correlate the probability of dislocation recovery and commensurate reduction of resistivity due to dislocation density.

What you can hear due to materials issues is an interesting area. If you do isolate a phenomenon attributable to metals, I would be interested in discussing it further.

[Abstract]

A couple points from a purly physical perspective.

Electrons don't "line up"...their position can't be predicted.
No manufacturing "extrusion process" has the capability to rearrange sub-atomic particles.
At the atomic level there is much more "space" in metal than "material".



My (uninformed, untested) thoughts on this...

Any difference caused by switching the wire to reverse polarity would be negated by difference in contact quality at the termination of the wire. ESPECIALLY at the atomic level.

Some people (think they) can hear anything.

There would be more variance in whether the current was AC or DC than you'd see by switching ends of wire.

Who TF am I to argue with KF?

[Fischerman]

Who TF am I to argue with KF?

You're just a man...he was just a man. You can argue/discuss with him just as he could argue/discuss with you. And...you (we) are really arguing with something he 'allegedly' said and we don't really have all the context.

Kinda like the EJ thing where people take a 'Fuzz Face battery claim' and run with it. We can all hear battery voltage differences in Fuzz Faces...everybody can. We can hear alkaline vs. carbon/zinc in some FF. EJ certainly wasn't the first to point that out. But let him and his tech play a joke* on someone regarding battery brands and it gets blown out of porportion.

* - the joke was that there were two boxes of brand new individually sealed batteries, Eveready and Duracell (note that they are alkaline!). But one brand was an old box and the voltage was significantly low. Unwrap brand new batteries, put them in his Fuzz Face and let EJ consistently tell you which brand it was...because the voltage was different.