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Default Audio Interconnect cable Performance - is Return Wire Diametera Factor?

On 2020-12-07, Peter Wieck wrote:
Before I get snarky: I was making an analogy. Water in a pipe to electrons in a wire. What goes in is not what comes out, even though what comes out is very nearly instantaneous to what goes in. Nowhere was I suggesting sound in water, signals in water, and/or so forth.


No need to get snarky. There's a big difference between "instantaneous", a word
which you kept using, and "nearly instantaneous", which is a measurable quantity
in all cited cases. As long as you keep using the qualifier, we're all happy.

You are correct: the electrons pushing at one end of the wire are rarely the
"same" electrons that come out, because the signal has both positive and negative
components which we expect, over time, to balance out*. When you hit a diaphragm
on a full water pipe, the shock/signal/wavefront is transmitted to the other side
without carrying the water itself from one end to the other.

*interesting case: there are situations where it would be bad to have a signal
which unbalanced the overall electric charge of the two end points. One solution,
used in analog audio, is the balanced signal pipe, in which one conductor carries
the inverted signal of the other, guaranteeing continuous balance. A solution found
in digital transmission is a balanced coding, where extra bits are used to encode
each payload bit so that different amounts of charge can be selected on-the-fly.

-dsr-