I'm bemused that people who accept all sorts of mythology about wanky wire are resistant to the idea that the signal direction (independent of topology) can be equally important. I smell inconsistency.

Speaker cables don't have grounding issues.

Standard coaxial style interconnects, digital or analogue, don't have grounding issues.

Naim SNAIC type interconnects don't have grounding issues.

XLR-XLR balanced interconnects don't have grounding issues.

In fact directionality as experienced by most listeners cannot be written off to grounding arrangements with most audio cabling.

Electrons are not flowing in your cables, they are hurtling randomly about at about 1.6 million m/s, the signal wobbles them back and forward at less than 0.1cm/s peak. But power is definitely travelling from one end to the other, as is information, it's travelling at a substantial percentage of the speed of light in the form of an electric and magnetic field, any movement of electrons is a side-effect. The salesman's imagination can run riot with the consquences of this.

I think in practice cable sound is down to bulk electrical parameters and directionality is in the mind of the listener. The quality of connector and connection is obviously significant over the medium to long term. You probably really do get diodes in a bad junction between two metals and their oxides, after all that's how radios used to work.

Paul