Headphone Cables/Builds w/ Pictures - DIY

In short, no.

While there may be some physical artifacts, visible under a microscope, that arise through crystalline alignment from drawing the cable via OCC in a single direction and that are suggestive of the direction it was drawn in, I’m unaware of any theory or measurement that suggests electrical performance would be different in one direction vs. the other.

TDR works properly in both directions, for example. Resistance measurements don’t change.

However, some “directional” cables are directional because of how they are wired. Usually this is with shielded cables, where the shield is connected at the source end but not at the receiver. Thus you need to know which end of the cable is which, and an easy way to do this is to stick an arrow on the thing indicating the direction the signal is intended to flow (i.e. from source, to amplifier, and whatever other processing you might have in between).

But that has nothing to do with how the conductors involved behave in one direction vs. another.

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